The Brief History of the Dead

NINE. THE NUMBERS

How many people was any one human being likely to remember? A thousand? Maybe if you were cursed with a particularly slipshod memory. So then – ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million? Of course, if you ran out your life in some small village deep in the Himalayas, the number would be greatly diminished, but Michael Puckett wasn't thinking about Himalayan villagers. Or monks, or nuns, or kids who never lived past that falling-down-drunk stage of toddlerhood. He was thinking about himself, his own life, and by extension he was thinking about Laura. She was the common element, after all, the link or what have you. After all the discussion he had heard in the city, that much was obvious.

He had spent the better part of a week trying to come up with a good solid number, one that took his entire forty-three years of life into account. At first he tried to make the calculations mentally, sorting through the great crowd of people in his head as he listened to the stereo or rested in bed at night. But when he realized how complicated the whole matter was turning out to be, he pulled out his #2 pencil and a blank pad of paper and settled down to work.

He began with his immediate family – his mother, his father, and his two sisters, plus the older brother who had died at the age of eleven when he snapped his neck jumping his bike into a creek-bed. Then he added his extended family into the mix: both sets of grandparents, his aunts and uncles, his great-aunts and great-uncles, his cousins, including his second cousins, the husbands, wives, and children of his cousins, the second husbands and second wives and in some cases the second children of his cousins, and so on. Next he counted off his schoolmates and teachers, from kindergarten through graduate school, and then the schoolmates and teachers of his sisters, tagging on the occasional college friend that the two of them had brought home for a visit. There were his neighbors to remember. There were the people he knew from work, beginning with his first job sliding pizzas into ovens at Pizza D'Action and ending with his sixteen years at Coca-Cola. There were the members of his church, though when it came to church, he had never been what anybody would have called devout. He was more of an Easter-Christmas-and-whenever-someone-managed-to-drag-his-ass-out-of-bed-on-a-Sunday kind of guy. And then there were the thousands of loose friends who kept jumping into his memory – people who didn't fit into any obvious category, but nonetheless there they were, like acorns that came popping out of the grass as he mowed his lawn. There were the friends of those friends, and sometimes there was even another tier of friends beyond that. He added his girlfriends to the list (there had been seventeen of them), and his girlfriends' families, and then his first wife and her family, and his second wife and her family, and of course there was his son and his son's classmates and his softball team and his other friends from the block and whatnot. And there were all the people he had met at plays and dinner receptions and parties and weddings over the years. Oh, and then there were what he supposed he might call his personal commercial acquaintances, as opposed to his professional commercial acquaintances – his business contacts and such – though now that he thought about it, he guessed he would have to take them into account, as well. He was thinking of all the clerks and salespeople he knew by sight and sometimes even by name: the people who worked at the grocery stores, pharmacies, tool shops, garages, department stores, restaurants, and movie theaters he frequented.

Any number of times he imagined he was finished with the list, but he kept uncovering new clusters of acquaintances: his Boy Scout troop, the other guys at his gym, the twenty-some faces he remembered from his one disastrous AA meeting. He would go to the kitchen to rinse off a plate, and he would remember the plumber who had repaired his faucet for the past ten years, and the rotating lineup of plumber's assistants he had employed, and the son he had been forced to bring on call with him that one day when the schools closed down, who had put a deck of playing cards in Michael's toaster and almost set his kitchen on fire. Everything he saw, touched, or listened to seemed to remind him of a few more people he had neglected to write down. A woman he had seen at the library once and for some reason had never forgotten. His dentist and his dental hygienist. The guys he used to play pool with when he was in college. Finally, when he paged through his notes, he realized that he had forgotten somehow to list his sisters' extended families: their husbands and in-laws, his nephews and nieces, and on and on through the great cascade of additional people who seemed to be connected to everyone he knew, excepting only his brother, the one who had died, who was a broken thread to him and had no such connections.

When he tallied up the list he had made, the number he came up with was forty-two thousand, but for the next few days he kept discovering little pockets and byways of extra people – where did they all come from? – and if he had to guess, he would say that the number was probably closer to fifty thousand, or maybe even seventy.

"I can't believe it would be that high," Joyce said when Puckett showed him the list. "You must be imagining you remember people you don't really remember."

"I was thinking it was probably too low, actually."

"I doubt that." He gave the dismissive little stiff-palmed wave of his fingers – nothing more than a twitch, really – that he always used when he wanted to drive Puckett crazy. "Underestimation has never exactly been your defining characteristic."

Puckett ought to have buried him when he had the chance.

Joyce had succumbed to the Blinks just a few hours after they set out for the penguin roost. He had taken on a sagging posture that Puckett had mistaken for sleep until the sledge rounded a curve and Joyce tipped over sideways, striking the window with the side of his face. All at once, Puckett knew the truth. He cut the engine and felt Joyce's neck for a pulse. His skin was still warm, but there was nothing moving beneath it – no air, no blood. Even the muscles had lost their tension. It was the seventh death Puckett had seen in the past two weeks. He was getting used to the signs.

It had occurred to him that he ought to try the old breath-on-the-mirror test he was familiar with from so many movies. But then again, he reasoned, it was hardly necessary when the person in question was so obviously dead.

He and Joyce had never known whether to treat each other as friends or antagonists. Or maybe it was just that their antagonism and their friendliness had been so inextricably tied up with each other that it was impossible for anybody to tell the two apart. It was through their arguments, their bickering, that they expressed their fundamental goodwill toward each other, and they both took a particular pleasure in pretending they disliked the other more than they did. It was part of the game. For Puckett to admit that he was upset over losing Joyce, then, would have been a violation of the rules.

To tell the truth, though, he wasn't as upset as he had guessed he would be. After all, there was a part of him that had known this was coming for a long time. He only wondered how long it would be before it came for him, as well.

It would have taken him the rest of the day and a good portion of the next to break into the ice and lay a respectable grave for Joyce, and it seemed more important to cover some more ground before the horizon swallowed all the good light, so he decided to bury him after he made it across the bay to the second transmitter. He started up the sledge and began following his compass over the ice. It wasn't long, though, before he felt himself becoming feverish and began losing awareness of his surroundings. It was the virus coming on – he knew it. His skin seemed to be coming loose from his skeleton, like a star casting off its final wobbling shell of gas. His eyes watered over and gradually lost their focus. The last thing he remembered was waking for a few moments some indeterminate time later and watching as a great wall of ice and black rock slowly grew larger in his windshield. Then he fell asleep again, and there was the pinwheel of gold and silver light, and when he tried to touch it, the petals folded together into a single enormous pillar, as tall and wide as a redwood tree. It was only through a supreme effort of his will and imagination that he was able to compress the pillar into a small rod the size of a #2 pencil – which was indeed a #2 pencil, the same pencil he would later use to prepare his list.

Joyce was the first person he saw when he arrived in the city. Immediately he knew that he must be dead. Puckett took a step back, stumbling over his shoes.

"What are you doing here?" Joyce asked him, and Puckett asked the same question, "What are you doing here?" And then they argued about something for a while. And then they went their separate ways. And it felt good, it felt right, it felt just like old times.

Puckett had made no particular effort to stay in touch with Joyce, and he was pretty sure Joyce would say the same about him if anyone asked. But then staying in touch had not demanded any particular effort. Wherever they went, it seemed, they were destined to meet. Puckett could hardly walk into a bar or restaurant without finding Joyce at one of the tables, clicking the salt and pepper shakers together or making lean-tos out of the cardboard coasters, and if he was not there already, inevitably he would arrive within the next few minutes. He could not step out for a quick stroll, could not go shopping at the grocery store, without suddenly coming upon him at the deli counter or the back end of the soup aisle. They had run into each other at the movie theater, the gym, and the drug store, and at the random intersections of a thousand different streets. More than once Puckett had stepped out of a stall in a public restroom to find Joyce buckling his belt only one stall over. They were no longer surprised to see each other, and it was with a certain sense of fatality that they would take up whatever conversation they had left unfinished the last time they met.

Just one day after he told Joyce about the list he had made, for instance, Puckett ran across him on the ground floor of an office building. Puckett was dashing in to take a quick drink from the water fountain, and Joyce was walking across the black marble tiles of the lobby toward the elevators, and they saw each other and realized their paths were going to cross again. After a short pause Joyce said, "I would wager I remember about two thousand people total."

Puckett shook his head. "No, I'm telling you, it's much higher than that. I'm not talking about the number of people you can call to mind without any effort at all, you know. I'm talking about the number of people you're capable of remembering when the right chain of associations occur. Sit down and figure it out sometime."

"See, the difference between us is that you imagine your own memory is reliable, or at least reliable enough to offer up a basically trustworthy accounting of your life. And I don't. Not for a second."

"I doubt my memory is any more reliable than yours. I just happen to know mine a little better."

"Riddle me this then," Joyce said. "If everybody in the world remembered – what? fifty thousand people, you said? – then how would they all fit into a city the size of this one? This place is pretty big, but I don't think it's that big."

The next day they bumped into each other again, as they were cutting across the southwest corner of the square. Puckett said, "First of all, do you have any idea how extensive this city actually is?"

"Do you?"

"No, but I have a feeling it's a lot bigger than you imagine. A lot bigger than this one district, that's for sure. I did some asking around, and nobody seems to know how far the streets go. The closest I came was a guy who used to dabble in cartography. He said in almost ten years of mapping he had never once seen the end of the city. He said – and I quote – that if the city had a boundary line, it must have gone tearing off like a blue streak whenever he came around."

"Okay. Maybe. And what's your second of all?"

"How's that?"

"You said 'first of all.' Implying a second of all. So what's your second of all?"

"Well, second of all, when I say that we each remember fifty or a hundred thousand people, I don't mean fifty or a hundred thousand people that nobody else remembers. There's bound to be a lot of overlap. Both of us remember Laura, for instance. We both remember the folks from the office. And not that it makes any difference, but we both remember Meatyard and Weisz and Turner and those guys, too."

Their next encounter took place in a burger joint where they had both happened to stop for lunch. Four gray-haired Korean women were playing mah-jongg at one of the tables, and a couple of IAS officers were sitting at the counter silently scanning the room. They were still wearing their yellow collars, for some reason, though what damage was left to be done Puckett couldn't imagine.

Joyce began with, "I think it does make a difference, actually." "What does?"

"The fact that we remember Turner and Meatyard and the others. You said it didn't make a difference. I say that it does."

"I didn't mean that it doesn't matter at all. But it can't change what happened to them, can it?"

"Really? You don't think Lauras memory has changed what's happening to us?"

"Of course it has. But Laura is still alive. Or at least we presume she is." He took a sip of his coffee. Even after ten years of sobriety, he was still tempted to order a beer whenever he was eating a burger and fries. But, as always, he resisted the urge.

"Yes. And as long as we were alive, we were keeping some part of the rest of them alive, as well. Think about it, Puckett," Joyce said. "Think of all the people who must have vanished from this place after we died. Surely there was somebody who existed on this side only because you existed on the other. Can you really say that that doesn't matter?"

As usual, Joyce was missing his point. But also as usual, he was not entirely wrong. Of course it mattered; Puckett had no doubt about that. Still, he answered, "All I'm saying is that we're powerless to affect what happens over there from over here. The arrow goes in one direction, and in one direction only."

"I'm not sure everybody would agree with you on that," Joyce said, but Puckett was too tired of the argument to ask him to elaborate.

It was much later in the day and he was walking home through the quiet, blue-lit streets when he realized that his older brother – the one who had died when he was only eleven, when Puckett was only four – must have continued out his days in the city until very recently, when Puckett himself had died and the memory of him had finally vanished from the face of the earth.

My God, Puckett thought. That was almost forty years.

He had already figured out that his parents, his grandparents, his wife, his son, the entire roster of people he had known over the course of his lifetime had remained in the city until the very moment he had died. He would even say that he had reconciled himself to the fact, though it was hard when it came to some people, he would admit: his son, for instance, who was only fifteen, after all, and just coming into the prime of his youth. But somehow the idea that his brother, who had been gone for such a long time, was one of those people had never occurred to him. It made him feel as though he had wandered into some strange empty building where a door at the end of a twisting hallway opened onto the bedroom he had slept in as a boy. He was almost afraid to step inside, but he knew he would regret it forever if he didn't.

By the time he got home, he had made up his mind. He would have to search out the city for any traces of his brother.

The investigation, as it turned out, was not as difficult as he had supposed it would be. His first thought was to track down some of the city's old census records and look for his brother's name inside. There was a vacated library around the corner from his building, the front door of which had been removed from its hinges and carted away by vandals at some point. While he knew that the shelves inside were mostly bare, it still seemed like the most obvious place to start. In the Archives Room, on the third floor, he found a cabinet labeled, miracle of miracles, CENSUS RECORDS – PAST FIVE YEARS. He used a metal ruler to jimmy off the lock. The cabinet had already been emptied out, though, and the only thing that remained inside was an old Vaseline jar filled with red rubber bands. He was about to leave when he saw a row of phone books stacked beneath the information counter. The books were almost ten years out of date. Still, though, he was able to find his brother's name inside, with an address listed on the outskirts of the monument district.

He tore the page out of the book along with a map that was folded into the back cover and took it along with him. There was a chill in the air as he navigated the streets. His ears began to ache, and so he pulled his collar up and pressed the fabric against his temples until he could hear the workings of his own body, that distant rumbling sound that always reminded him of logs rolling down a hill.

The map from the phone book seemed to be some kind of interpretive cubist diagram of the city rather than an actual map. A number of small streets – streets that were not displayed on the map at all – had been wedged in between others that were supposed to be directly adjacent. And some of the streets that were on the map had been disarranged slightly, intersecting at the wrong places, as though some careless shopper had taken them out to look at them and then put them back on the first shelf that came to hand. In one case, a weedy, half-dead golf course stretched over what ought to have been – but was not – four city blocks named for the great cities of Southern Africa: Kinshasa, Nairobi, Lusaka, and Johannesburg.

More than once Puckett had to retrace his steps and ask for directions. The sole of one of his shoes came loose and began to flap against the pavement.

All the same, he managed to find the building he was looking for.

He rode the elevator to the fifth floor, gave a precautionary knock on the door of the apartment listed in the phone book, and then took hold of the doorknob. He had expected the apartment to be empty – he didn't know why – but just as he was getting ready to open the door, a lanky middle-aged man answered. The man's glasses were smudged with some kind of transparent grease, and a feather duster of limp yellow hair trailed over his eyebrows. He was eating raisins out of a dixie cup.

"I help you?" he said after a few moments of silence, and Puckett realized he had been staring at the man like an imbecile.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I think I screwed up. I was looking for somebody who used to be at this address. Or maybe he did. At least I thought so."

The man popped a raisin into his mouth. "This somebody have a name?"

"Nathaniel Puckett."

"Mm-hmm. He cleared out – oh – about the tail end of the evacuation, I'd say. You knew him?" "He was my brother." "You Mikey?" "Well… Michael."

The man nodded and stepped aside. "Come on in then. Your brother and I were roommates."

Your brother and I were roommates. It was that simple, apparently. Puckett could hardly believe it. He sat down on a sofa that had been upholstered in a pattern of blue and white stripes, an enormous beast of furniture that took up half the room. There were no other chairs around, and so the man with the glasses sat next to him. "I suppose you want to ask me about your brother," he said. "Fire away. I'm not armed." He had finished his raisins, and he crushed the dixie cup and began transferring it slowly between his palms, smoothing out the folds and bulges. Everything about him seemed to amble along at its own deliberate speed, the lone exception being his habit of snipping off the beginnings of his sentences, which was a way of making up for lost time, Puckett guessed.

Puckett's brother had always been a mystery to him, a ghostlike stranger with a dirt bike and a broken neck who had collected comic books and stayed up late watching television and had once convinced Puckett to curl up into a ball at the bottom of his sleeping bag so that he could swing him in circles around the living room. That was all he remembered about him. But over the course of the next few hours, he learned any number of new things. Upon his death, apparently, Nathaniel had taken a room in one of the city's many orphanages, as most children did. He might simply have remained there – again, as most children did. But though he had never grown older than eleven, he had eventually decided to move out on his own. He continued to ride his bicycle for a few years, though it was a racing bike rather than a dirt bike this time. He was in three or four minor traffic accidents before he decided to sell the thing. Afterward, he became an affi-cionado of the subway system. On Sunday afternoons, he would ride the cars for hours at a stretch, taking them as far as the white clay district, while he stared out at the other cars and the dark tunnels and the aquariumlike spaces of the waiting platforms. For seven years he had worked in a hobby shop selling model airplanes and die-cast figurines to young men nostalgic for the childhood he himself would never lose. Then he had gotten a job pruning bushes at a greenhouse, and after that he had worked for a while as an assistant groundskeeper at one of the city's largest topiary gardens.

The man who was telling Puckett about him had been staying in the apartment's extra room for almost five years now. He and Nathaniel had met at a lecture on "The Comic Book as Literature," he said. The man had been an English teacher when he was alive, with a taste for what he called "illustrated novels." And as for Nathaniel, comic books still made up his main reading material. He had built up a sizable collection since he had arrived in the city. He invited the man to his apartment the day after the lecture to look at them.

"And I never left," the man said. "What can I tell you? I was brand new. Needed a place to stay, and your brother needed the company. It worked out just fine."

"Did he ever talk about me?" Puckett asked. "You and your family both."

Puckett heard himself letting out a sigh. "I don't know why I should be relieved by that. I barely… and here I am…" He was stumbling over his thoughts. "You know, I really wasn't sure he would remember me."

"He remembered. You didn't get a chance to say good-bye, did you?"

"To say good-bye in person? No. Mom took me to his grave once, but I was pretty little back then. I basically just stopped thinking about him after a while."

The whole time the man was talking, he had been shaping the dixie cup slowly between his fingers, and now he was holding a nearly perfect sphere in his hands. "It's important to say goodbye. My family was at my bedside when I died."

"Were you sick?"

"Leukemia. A bad time."

"I'm sorry."

"No need to be."

"But your family was there?"

"They were. You want to hear about it?"

And with that he began his story.

He said that he had been sick for a long time before he was hospitalized. "Almost three years. People say they want to die in their own home. But me, I was ready for the hospital. The sterilized sheets, the machines, the whole bit. It just seemed easier there. Easier to cast myself off, I mean. There was less to let go of. You have to understand, I was in pain. Had been in pain for a long time. I was ready to die. Whenever I felt myself slipping away, though, I would see the pictures of my wife and my boys on the wall, or I would notice the chair by the dresser and remember where I was when I picked it up, or any one of a thousand other things. They were like these little knots that I couldn't unfasten. Finally I decided that if I was going to die I needed to be in unfamiliar surroundings. Maybe because I was getting ready to move into the most unfamiliar surrounding of all. Don't know. In any case, I asked my family to put me up in the hospital, and they did. They were real good about it. They visited a couple of times a day – even my oldest, who was in college at the time. One day he asked me – Clay, that's my oldest – he asked me if I believed in an afterlife. I didn't know what to tell him. You know those stories you used to hear about people who pass through the tunnel of white light and see Heaven waiting for them on the other side? Never knew what to make of them myself. But the fact that the people who survived to tell us about it were always by definition the ones who turned around and came back – well, it would be hard for me to explain why, but it made me doubt their reliability. Still, I kept thinking about it. People used to believe that you could look into the eyes of a dead man and see an image of the last thing he ever saw. Did you know that? I had always imagined the opposite myself. That your vision turned the other way as you died. That time flipped inside out and you saw what was coming next rather than what had come before. Anyway, I wanted to answer my boy's question if I could. I didn't know whether he would be in the room when I died. Didn't know whether I would be able to communicate with him even if he was. So I decided to write him two letters. One of the letters said that there was nothing at all after you died – just a big winking out, not even darkness. I sealed that letter up in a red envelope. And the other letter said that it was all true, everything you've ever heard – the tunnel, your loved ones beckoning you on through the light, and finally Heaven – or at least something like it. I put that letter in a blue envelope. There are other possibilities, of course, but those were the two that seemed the most likely to me. I wanted to keep it simple. I made up a rhyme so I wouldn't forget which envelope was which: 'Red is dead. Blue is new.' For days I kept repeating it to myself. Red is dead. Blue is new. Red is dead. Blue is new.

See, I was going to try to choose between them at the last second, when my vision flipped. But I started to worry that I wouldn't be able to talk when the time came. So I asked the nurse to put one of the envelopes in each of my hands. I held on tight to them. My room had a window, and I could see the sky passing over the top level of the parking garage. First the sun, then the stars, and then the sun again. That kind of thing. It was evening a couple of days later when I finally died. Like I said, my whole family was there. My wife, both my boys. I could feel it coming on. This time there were no knots to hold me in place. I let go of one of the envelopes, and I clutched the other one as hard as I could."

Puckett was fascinated. "Which envelope did you hold on to?" "The red one," the man said. "Red is dead." The lower half of his face gave an awkward little twist. "Obviously I messed up." Puckett laughed. "I'll say."

"If I had it to do over again, I'd pick the blue one, of course." "Of course."

They both fell quiet after that. It was a good half minute before the man bent his head to the side and the light from the window touched the oil on his glasses, where it butterflied open in a dozen different colors. "What are you thinking about?" the man said.

"Why do you ask?"

"You were squeezing the bridge of your nose. That's your thinking gesture. You did it when I mentioned your brother's comic books, and then when I told you about my son, and you did it again just now. I'm good at spotting them."

Puckett put his hands on his knees. "I was thinking I should thank you for spending so much time with me. Believe me, it helped. But I need to be going now."

The couch released Puckett with a long creak of its springs. Before he could make his way to the door, though, the man said,

"You know, your brother was my only close friend in the city. It's good to have someone to tell your stories to. Which is my way of saying come back any time."

He reached out for Puckett in what Puckett presumed was a handshake. But when Puckett went to meet it, the man gave him the dixie cup instead: a small, round globe, worn smooth as velvet by his fingers.

"Would you mind throwing this out for me?" he said. "There's an ashtray right over there by the elevators."

So what was Puckett thinking about? Mailmen.

Specifically, the number of mailmen he had known in his life.

They were yet another subset of people he had forgotten to take into account, though so far he had been able to remember only eight of them distinctly. There was the mailman who had always asked to see his driver's license when he signed for a package, the one he had spotted buying a case of wine in the liquor store, and half a dozen others.

He was sure he would remember a few more as he let the line of his thoughts play out. It must have been the story about the letters that had brought them to mind. As it had brought his son to mind, and his second wife, and his parents – the people who would have gathered around his own hospital bed if he had had one.

He was trying his best not to think about them. It was just too hard.

The air was colder than it had been even an hour or so before, and a thick blanket of clouds had emerged while he was inside. As he was walking home, he overheard two men, maybe thirty years old, hypothesizing about various ways they might contact Laura. This was a popular subject of conversation in the city, though one that never seemed to produce any concrete initiatives.

"Has anybody thought about using a Ouija board?" one of them said.

"Well, maybe she could use a Ouija board to contact us, but it doesn't work the other way. See, I was thinking we could get everybody together and just try to, you know, project our thoughts or something. A harmonic convergence sort of thing. She believes in that shit, or at least she did back in the day."

"I don't see why we couldn't at least give the Ouija board thing a shot." The man made a rolling little high-pitched horror-movie note. "They came from beyond the grave!"

Puckett passed behind a clump of trees, and soon their voices faded away.

At the bus bench on the corner of Georgia and Sixty-fifth, a man with motor oil stains on his clothing was adjusting himself through the pocket of his pants. Puckett remembered some twenty car mechanics, though he was pretty sure he had already written them all down; he would have to check his list to make sure.

At the lower end of the golf course, a blind man was feeling his way down the sidewalk, tugging on the rigging of his beard. Puckett could remember at least six blind people.

He was almost home when he saw Joyce stepping out of a jeweler's shop, hunching his shoulders as the wind struck his face. He suddenly felt a tremendous weariness in his bones. Maybe it was the walk, or maybe it was his conversation with the English teacher, or maybe it was just the effort of thinking about his brother after so long, but the last thing he wanted right now was another pointless argument.

He ducked beneath an awning and waited for him to pass. Joyce was listening to his watch, shaking his wrist as he held it to his ear, and he did not see him. Puckett watched him cross the street at the corner. Then he moved out of the doorway, blew a long breath of warm air into his hands, and felt the first tingle of frost on his cheek.

He looked up into the sky, a loosely swirling motion of gray and white flakes.

Not this again, he thought.

It was snowing.