The Brief History of the Dead - Brockmeier Kevin - Страница 7

"Come on, sweetie, time for bed," she heard her father saying, and then it was fifteen years later, and her college roommate was telling her, "I'm staying with Kyle for the weekend, so you've got the room all to yourself." Next it was ten years after that, and she listened to her boss as he rapped on the door of her office and said, "I'm going to give you one word, and you tell me what you think: Antarctica." And a year before that, her boyfriend had told her, "That's the lipstick. You should wear that color from now on. God, it makes me want to bite your lips off." And then, just a week before she left for the Pole with Puckett and Joyce: "What, you can't spare a lousy dollar? Miss New-Black-Shoes-with-Her-Fancy-Matching-Belt. Miss Too-Busy-to-Give-a-Damn-About-Anyone-but-Herself." This was the man who begged for change outside the Coca-Cola building.

She would listen to their voices until the wind drowned them out, and then she would emerge from the fine open air of her memories into the low gray arches of the hut and the endless hours of sitting and pacing.

She looked for ways to draw out her routine, teasing it apart into its various threads and following each one to the end, no matter how wispy and frail it became. She wasn't going to allow herself to go crazy, she decided. She exercised for a full hour in the morning, rather than just fifteen minutes, jogging in place in her coat and gloves. She read books that forced her to pay attention to every word. The meals she cooked became more and more laborious: pot roasts, stews, and casseroles that used up her store of vegetables and needed to simmer for half the afternoon. She pounced at every interruption, suspending whatever she was doing in order to tug out a crease in her blanket or sweep a trace of snow up from the floor. But nothing seemed to help. The truth was that no matter how many times she lifted herself out of her chair, trying to simulate a feeling of urgency, she was never truly going anywhere. She was stuck right where she was, and she knew it.

She was making a minor repair to the stove one morning when she nearly chopped off her left hand. It happened like this: She heard a bolt rattling above the burner, and when she couldn't get the leverage she needed to tighten it, she climbed on top of the stove, trying for a different angle. She could see straight down the crevice in back. A metal tailing of some kind had come loose from the wall. It was trembling and jerking, brushing against the stove as the wind shook the cabin. That was where the noise was coming from; it wasn't the bolt at all. She knew the noise would drive her crazy if she let it continue, and so she tried to twist the tailing back into place with her fingers. When that didn't work, she tried to saw it off with her pocket knife. And when that didn't work, she decided to hack it loose with a hatchet she found in the tool chest. She steadied herself against the stove with her left hand, brought the hatchet up with her right, and just before she reversed her swing, she lost her grip.

Her hand was so numb from the cold that she didn't even realize it was empty until the ax came tilting past her head and crashed into the top of the stove. It made a bell-like rolling noise and then clattered to the floor.

When she looked down, she saw a silvery gash in the stove, curling down into itself like a coring of frozen soil. The gash was right at the tip of her fingers – she might have been pointing to it.

That was the moment when she realized how truly alone she was. If the hatchet had fallen just an inch or two to the left, she would have bled to death before anyone found her – weeks or, she was prepared to imagine, even years later. She would have to be more careful from now on.

She began to remember certain incidents from her life – meetings, conversations, and various other episodes – with a clarity that amazed her. Once, when she was in college, she had spent an entire day at the Chicago zoo watching a baby giraffe, the last the world would see, swirling and jiggling a length of iron chain with its long black tongue. On the day she began her first job, working behind the counter of a dry cleaner's, a customer had given her a pair of pants with a ring-shaped stain on the crotch and asked, "Can you get Formula 44-D out of polyester-rayon?" Then there was the time her mother took her to the birthday party of a school friend and afterward scolded her for singing the phrase "When are we going home?" over and over again, to the tune of the "Happy Birthday" song. Laura had been only four years old at the time.

She wondered if she was undergoing the same rush of memories that the dying are said to experience – only much, much more slowly.

Laura Byrd, wildlife specialist, prepares for the long winter.

And then there was the crying again, which always came as a complete surprise. She couldn't understand why she wasn't able to anticipate it. Maybe it was like the pain that women underwent in childbirth, those million agonies of cramping and stretching that washed the mind clean as they took place. Or maybe it had something to do with the upwelling of memories that seemed to place her so firmly in her past life, a life that had overtaken and caught hold of her just as her present was becoming more and more indistinct and her future was fading to the merest suggestion. Maybe the crying was part of her other life, her real life, the one that was unfolding before her eyes, and maybe she was nothing more than a visitor there.

One day, not long before the thermometer stopped working, she realized that the hum she was so accustomed to hearing from the shelter had gone silent. This was the sound the hut made as it converted the vibrations of its atoms into heat. It emanated from deep inside the walls, a tone so uniform and regular that she barely recognized it as a sound at all. She wouldn't even have noticed it was missing if it hadn't been for a brief lapse in the wind that brought a nearly perfect stillness to the air. She took off her glove and touched her fingers to one of the heating panels. She could feel the cold biting through her skin. When she lifted the frame from around the panel and slid the locking plate loose, she saw that the coil inside had faded to a pale, lusterless gray. She looked behind the other panels and found exactly the same thing: dozens of dimmed-out heating coils, like dead worms washed onto the sidewalk after a rain. She had known all along that it would happen, and it had. The heating panels had finally quit working.

There were two tents left in the storage closet (Puckett and Joyce had taken the others), and she set one of them up in the center of the living room so that she could sleep inside it. It was surprisingly well insulated – with its own limited heating system, one of the new so-called "soft coils" – and before long she was spending most of her day in there. The light that filtered through the fabric gave the air a milky pink coloring, and the dome inhaled and exhaled slightly as the air pressure shifted in the hut. She had the absurd impression – a dream, really – that she was living inside a jellyfish. Early in the morning, before she was wholly awake, she would lie in her sleeping bag listening to the watery lurching of the wind and imagine that she was pumping slowly across the floor of the ocean as millions of yellow diatoms sailed around her. Dreaming was easier than screaming, and screaming was easier than worrying, and worrying was easier than crying, which was what she knew she would be reduced to if she didn't keep a hard eye on herself.

She left the tent each morning to make breakfast and to exercise, and every so often to use the bathroom, and then again in the evening to cook dinner. The shelter retained only a small amount of the heat it had stored over the past six months, and the stove warmed it up a little bit more, but she still had to put on her coat and gloves every time she climbed outside the tent. She didn't yet know what she would do when the electricity finally gave out completely. It had flickered off a few days before, coming back on in a series of arrested spurts. She had counted every second between the bursts of light and darkness, feeling sick in the pit of her stomach. But for now, at least, it was still flowing.