The Brief History of the Dead

ELEVEN. THE CHANGES

Winter had come to the city, and the snow covered every level surface: the roads and the sidewalks, the fountains and the park benches, even the leaves on the trees, or at least the ones that weren't cocked over onto their sides. Lindell Trimble had to wade through a solid foot of the shit every morning just to make his way down the steps of his building, and there was more waiting for him wherever he went. On most of the district's streets and sidewalks it melted under the day's traffic, then froze again after the sun fell, so that a glasslike sheen of ice whose only visible effect was to slightly magnify the pavement would send person after person sprawling onto his ass. He stood at his door sometimes and watched them fall, one ridiculous tumble after another. They looked like monkeys or rag dolls, barely human, and the idea that he himself might cut so pitiable a figure, that some smug son of a bitch in a three-piece suit might watch him sliding around on the ice and cringe, was appalling to him. This was why he always walked through the banks of snow along the curb, despite the damage it did to his shoes and the cuffs of his pants.

That morning in particular he was squeezing around the side of an abandoned car when the motherfucking beggar came at him again, the one he could never seem to shake. He launched straight into his brother-can-you-spare-a-dime routine: "Got some change for me today? Hey, come on, buddy. You look like a man of wealth and power. I'm sure you've got a little change you can give to a fellow in need, don't you?" And blah blah blah blah blah.

As usual, the beggar had appeared from out of nowhere, and when he realized Lindell wasn't going to answer him, he began shouting and waving his arms. "What's the matter with you, pal? Too good for me, is that it? Mr. Won't-Even-Look-Me-in-the-Goddamned-Eye. Mr. So-and-So-with-His-Leather-Briefcase-and-His-Hundred-Dollar-Haircut."

He followed Lindell across the street, the pair of them sliding around on the ice like a couple of jackasses, and when they reached the dirty snow heaped in the opposite gutter, he climbed over after Lindell and grabbed hold of his sleeve. Lindell shook him off.

"Whoa," the beggar said. "Whoa now." He held his hands out in a sign of contrition, wearing those fingerless black gloves that were the universal trademark of the urban poor. What, was Lindell supposed to believe that they couldn't afford to cover their fingers? Was that the idea?

"Hey, look, man, I'm sorry. I was just trying to get a rise out of you," the beggar said. "You know how it is. But you've got to understand I'm your friend, don't you, buddy? And friends look out for each other, right? So how about you check those pockets of yours again for me? I bet you've got some change you can spare for a good friend."

Lindell could see that his usual policy of fabricating a convenient distraction – pretending that he had spotted someone he knew down the block or that his phone had just gone off – and striding purposefully away wasn't going to do the job this time. He kept walking, though, plugging his feet one after the other into the hard crust of the snow. "Listen," he snapped out, "you're not going to chisel anything out of me, so why don't you just leave me the hell alone?"

Immediately the beggar fell away, giving a tight little laugh. "Yes sir, your highness," he said. "Right away, Your-Majesty-on-His-Holy-Goddamn-Golden-Fucking-Throne." He made a saluting gesture. Lindell glanced back just long enough to see him looking around for his next target.

Sometimes he thought there must be something about him that attracted such people from an infinite distance. You know the way that certain wild animals will scout around for miles in search of the cleanest place to empty their bowels? Well, he was the cleanest place, and they were the wild animals. It was uncanny. In every railway concourse or shopping mall, he was always the guy trailing the long line of religious cultists behind him, a bright, exploding flare of bald heads, orange robes, and ponytails. The freaks and the con artists, the drug addicts and schizophrenics: inevitably, no matter where he went, they seemed to zero right in on him. Even here in the city he could not seem to avoid them, whether it was the beggar with his patchy beard and his hard-luck stories or that nutcase with the bird fixation and the Jesus signs.

He stopped off at the coffee shop for an espresso. It was a Saturday, or what everyone had decided to regard as a Saturday, and he knew that the Coca-Cola offices would be mostly empty. No receptionist waiting to hand him his messages, no marketing staff gathered for the morning meeting. He sipped his drink at a tall counter looking out onto the sidewalk and the alley and a snow-covered basketball court with two metal hoops dripping chandeliers of ice where their nets ought to have been. The ice would crack into a thousand daggers at the very first basket, he thought. Swish, crash, boom, and there would be a few less players on the court the next day.

When he was finished, he took the crosswalk to the building on the other side of Erendira Street, unlocked the executive entrance, and closed it again behind him. Inside, the lobby was dark and quiet, with the weird theatricality and canyonlike feeling of spaciousness that all office buildings possess on the weekend. He rode the elevator to the seventh floor. The document he was looking for was in the top drawer of his desk. He had known for weeks that it would be best not to leave the thing lying around, but it was only the night before, while he was sipping a scotch and listening to some asshole broadcasting his jungle music for the whole building to hear, that he had finally decided what to do about it. So far, fewer than a dozen people knew what was what (or some of what was some of what, he should say, since despite their expertise nobody in the corporation had been able to piece together the whole story), and all of them had agreed that there was no earthly reason for them to tell anyone else. What was the use of drumming up trouble, after all, in a place where there was only peace and ignorance – a place where the peace, in fact, was the ignorance, and the ignorance was the peace?

To his last breath Lindell would continue to deny any responsibility for what had happened. It wasn't his fault. He couldn't have changed a single goddamned thing. Still, it was a fact that whoever had introduced the virus had done so only a few months after he and the PR department had initiated their white powder campaign, and the possibility that the whole chain of events was somehow inspired by the campaign – or even in answer to it – had definitely crossed his mind. The consumer affairs division had received any number of complaints during the high days of the congressional hearings and the media fuss, including at least one handwritten letter promising total world annihilation, but Lindell had learned from experience that there were cranks and failures beyond number in the world who blamed their lousy jobs and poor posture and the general lovelessness of their lives on some multinational corporation or another and who had nothing better to do than place angry phone calls and write menacing letters. Such people rarely if ever had the balls to act on their threats, for the simple reason that they were already defeated.

Yet somebody had decided to use Coca-Cola as the distribution nexus for the virus. That much was beyond doubt. The only questions to ask were who and why?

There were people in the PR division who were convinced that Islamic fundamentalists were to blame, or some group of anarcho-environmental zealots, or even, though it had been suggested mainly as a grim little joke, the Pepsi Corporation.

It seemed likely to Lindell, though, that whoever had devised the virus had no real grievance against Coca-Cola at all. They were simply looking for the product with the widest possible reach in the global marketplace, the one that would disseminate the virus with the most efficiency, and Coke was it.

Some ten years before, in response to falling transportation costs on one side of the equation and rising rates of water contamination on the other, the corporation had decided to centralize its processing operations in a single plant on the upper coast of Venezuela. It was cheaper to purify the entire soft drink supply in one location and then ship it the length of the world than it was to manufacture it in some fifty different noncontiguous locations and attempt to purify it on-site. Lindell had never been to the Venezuela plant, so he didn't know much about its layout, but his best guess was that someone had broken into whichever building held the processing equipment and introduced the virus directly into the syrup tanks. From there it had been mixed and bottled and carbonated, and then packaged and shipped around the world. And from there, undoubtedly, it had been consumed.

Of course, a lot of this was just guesswork on his part. He had sat in on the initial meeting between the CEO and the Infectious Agents Squad as the only delegate from the PR department. The one thing the IAS officers had been able to say for certain was that the contamination patterns suggested the virus was closely linked with Coca-Cola and that they intended to continue monitoring the situation.

The rest of the conversation had been very short. Lindell remembered it in its entirety.

"How many people are we talking about here?" the CEO had asked. "A few thousand? A few hundred thousand?"

One of the IAS officers had caught the other's eye, and they had both frowned.

"What? A few million?" the CEO said. "We wouldn't want to guess, sir." "More than that?" "As I say, sir…"

"So what are we supposed to do? Are you asking the company to issue a recall order? I presume you people are working on a cure – an antidote or something."

"The virus is lethal. That's all we've been authorized to tell you." His voice shifted to a lower tone. "I can add that it appears to be spreading rapidly, and not only within the Coke-drinking population."

It was a moment before the CEO realized what the officer was implying – that it was too late to do anything at all. That the situation was out of their control. That they would just have to watch from the sidelines and hope for the best.

The CEO let out a sigh. "I'll be motherfucked," he said.

"That may be, sir."

And then the IAS officers had left, and the rest of them had sat around the conference table staring blankly out of their faces until someone broke the silence with a "Jesus H. Christ" and the CEO had pledged them all to secrecy.

Just a few days later, Lindell was working on a contingency press release disavowing any rumors of Coke's connection to the virus when the weblines began reporting that the thing had gone airborne and waterborne. And a day or two after that, he was preparing a crisis statement for the CEO to read to the board of directors when he heard that the epidemic had reached the shores of the United States.

He could hardly see as he drove home that night.

He had died early the next morning.

The document he was looking for now was exactly where he had left it, behind the files in the top drawer of his desk. It was a list of ten names, the ten people who had been present at the meeting with the IAS officers and thus knew about Coca-Cola's liability with regard to the virus, followed by a statement promising that those people would not reveal this knowledge to anyone else, including the many other Coca-Cola employees who were present in the monument district. Six of the ten had signed the document, the six who had so far completed the crossing – which was to say the six who presumably knew this Laura Byrd woman, though for the life of him Lindell couldn't remember her. The other four had yet to appear in the city, and enough time had passed for the six of them who had appeared to conclude that they probably wouldn't be coming.

It was the CEO's opinion, and Lindell agreed, that since the document was the only hard evidence of the whole situation, it would be wise to destroy it.

And though no one had plainly directed him to do so, he was fairly certain – more certain than not – that none of the others would mind if he went ahead and took the initiative.

So it was that in the darkness of his office, lit only by the desk lamp, he ran the little fucker through the shredder and watched as the strips of paper fell as a single loose curtain onto the plastic lining of the trash can. There was so much air trapped beneath the lining that the opening had tightened into a sort of sphincter, and the pieces rested on the surface like cheap flakes of goldfish food floating in the water of an aquarium. He had to swat at the bag, pressing the air out, to make them drop to the bottom. A few stray threads of shredded paper drifted onto the floor during all the commotion. He could make out a Lind and a soev and an ola. He was picking them up when he heard a shuffling noise behind him.

"Unusual to see anybody here on a Saturday."

A current ran through Lindell’s back, and he straightened up. It was the building's custodian.

"Yeah, sometimes the work just follows you home," Lindell extemporized. He was holding the trash can in the crook of his arm, pressing it close to his body like a large bird whose wings he was trying to keep from beating. "You know how it is," he added.

"I can't say as I do," the custodian said.

"Well, no." Shut up and go away. "I guess you wouldn't, would you?"

The custodian gestured at the trash can. "So do you want me to empty that for you?"

"Oh, no, no. No, I'll do it," Lindell said. "I can do it. But thank you. Thank you very much," and without thinking he brushed past the custodian's cleaning-supply carriage and went down the hall, where he waited for the elevator to carry him to the lobby.

So it was that two minutes later he found himself standing outside with a small metal trash can in his hands. What the hell was he supposed to do with it? He couldn't just leave it sitting on the street, where anybody with the curiosity, the patience, and a good bottle of adhesive could scoop it up and paste the document back together. And he was afraid to toss it into one of the city's hundred-some-odd Dumpsters for the same reason: who knew what kind of person might find it? If he brought it home with him, he would have to carry it past the doorman who wore the silver cross around his neck and always asked a thousand questions – How's life treating you today? Can you believe all this snow we got last night? What's that you're holding there, Mr. Trimble? That trash can with the shredded paper? What's the writing on it say? Something about Coca-Cola? And if he went back to the office, there was the custodian to deal with.

Perhaps it was only paranoia on his part, but in his experience there was never any shortage of people waiting for the opportunity to fuck someone else over, and he had decided long ago that he would do everything in his power – walk any mile, tell any lie – to ensure that he was always the person who did the fucking and never the person who got fucked.

He was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, which was still slick with ice from the freezing weather. He watched as one, two, three different people lost their footing and fell to the pavement trying to maneuver around him. It was as though he were participating in some kind of effortless carnival game. Ding! Ding! Ding! and one after another they went down.

Sooner or later somebody was bound to ask him about the trash can, and so he made his way gingerly onto the strip of snow at the curb and began walking. The cabs were not running. It was useless to try to drive under such conditions. The ice was still hard on the ground and the sun had not come out from behind the clouds all morning. What a totally shit day. Maybe later on, after the foot traffic and the rising temperatures and the first few daredevil drivers had pounded a lane of slush down the middle of the road, the cabbies would clock in for the afternoon and begin patrolling the city. But until then he would just have to hoof it, trash can or no trash can.

He remembered what it was like when he was growing up and the salt trucks would invariably roll out to blanket the streets after the first couple of inches of snow had fallen. He wished that they were still around, those massive trucks with their massive drivers. But of course not. They were just another one of the millions of things that had been relinquished to the other world. He blamed Laura Byrd. She had never known any salt truck drivers, and so there were no salt truck drivers in the city. She had never known any software designers, and so there were no software designers. She had known plenty of petty little customer service types, and street people, and dirty screaming kids. But she had never known Lindell's wife or his girlfriend or his poor dead mother, and so he had to make do without his family.

Instead, look what he was left with – what they were all left with. There across the street from him, for instance, a woman had taken up a slumping posture on a cracked bus bench, where she was playing with a red rubber ball. Behind the window of her apartment, another woman was singing to herself as she slipped her arms into the kind of orange nylon vest worn by school safety officers. Inside a restaurant, a man was using a white plastic fork to eat what looked like a plate of tuna salad on iceberg lettuce, a paper napkin tucked into his collar like a bib. What a sorry lot.

Of the whole group of them, he was the only one who had had the good sense to muster everyone together in one place after the city emptied out.

What do you do when the world has dropped out from under you and you want to attract attention? You take a gun, and you fire it.

You would think that somebody else would have been bright enough to figure that out, but no.

Some guy was standing on the corner of the street handing out newspapers. Lindell tried to duck him, but the man stepped into his path.

"Some weather we're having lately, isn't it?" Oh great, he thought. A weather conversation. "Yes, it is." "So can I ask what you're carrying in the trash can?" "Nothing important. Nothing unusual."

The man grinned and passed his hand through the air. "Headline: Man Lugs Trash Can Through the Snow, Refuses to Explain."

Just then, a woman came up beside the newspaperman with a couple of styrofoam cups in her hands. She kissed him on the cheek. "All they had was decaf, so I brought us some hot chocolate instead," she said.

Lindell chose this moment to make his escape. The newspaperman and his girlfriend didn't try to stop him. He crossed Park Street and climbed carefully into the snow-heaped clearing above the sidewalks, where a few scattered trees stood alongside the monument. It was surprisingly difficult to keep his balance carrying the trash can. Ordinarily, when he felt himself slipping, he would have thrown his arms out as a counterweight, but with the trash can in his hands he had to use his elbows and shoulders instead, jerking them this way and that. He must have looked like a complete fool. When he reached the top of the stairs, he ventured off the walkway into the grass. He could hear the satisfying crunch of fresh snow beneath his feet. The monument, rising above the white field and the black footpaths, looked like a pin stuck through a giant map – which in a way, he supposed, it was.

There were a few dozen other people in the clearing, including a guy who was trying to ride his bicycle through the snow, a couple of bird-watchers, and a ring of those parapsychology fanatics he had been noticing more and more often around the city recently, six deluded nitwits linking their hands together and attempting to beam their thoughts out to Laura Byrd. He managed to avoid them by skirting along the outside row of benches and picnic tables. He broke out through the opposite corner of the park, leaving a dotted line of footprints behind him, along with a dish-shaped circle where he had put the trash can down so that he could adjust his pants.

For the past few weeks he had been conducting long conversations about the end of the world in his head. They were simple discussions that, if he wasn't careful, quickly degenerated into savage arguments and then into swiftly moving imaginary debates in which various people, sometimes judges and prosecuting attorneys, sometimes just disembodied voices, accused him of bearing direct responsibility for the effects of the virus. They insisted that he ought to have done something to halt its spread, or at least to have warned people that it was coming. Why didn't you? they needled him. Why didn't you do anything? But it wasn't his fault. It wasn't. Fuck you. He was just a regular guy who happened to land a public relations gig with Coca-Cola. Public relations was all about generating or occasionally deflecting interest in your particular brand and then channeling that interest down the most appropriate pathway. Generating and deflecting interest: that was all he had done. What thinking person could blame him for it?

It was true that he might have broken his vow and told the press what was going on, announced that the virus was being disseminated by way of his company's product – we're very sorry and all that sort of thing – but what good would it have done? The virus had already spread beyond all its original vectors. Coca-Cola or no Coca-Cola, there was no way of stopping it.

He didn't see how anything he might have done could have changed what happened in the end. And that was what the accusers in his head really wanted from him, wasn't it? They wanted change – a change in the fate of the world – and they wanted him to be the one who brought that change about.

Well, it was too much to ask. They could all go to hell.

"You can all go to hell." He said it out loud.

He was going down an open set of stairs, on a side street that had been used so rarely since the weather changed that the individual steps were almost impossible to distinguish beneath the snow. He held the trash can in one arm and used the other to steady himself, stomping and sliding his way to the bottom. Then he cut through an alley between two high buildings and turned right onto what he could tell had once been a major avenue. He took the sidewalk past an automotive supply shop and a toy store and a real estate office, then past a newspaper kiosk, and then past a whole foods store and a coffee bar, all of them abandoned in the days following the evacuation. The farther he moved from the center of the monument district, the fewer people he saw. The snow seemed to be getting deeper and deeper.

He realized he was heading toward the river. Though he hadn't planned it that way, he figured that it would be as good a place as any to get rid of the trash can. He would let the current carry it out of the city, past the streets and the buildings, past anyone who might be expected to discover it, until it sank into whichever lake or ocean or larger river eventually swallowed the water.

As a boy, on empty afternoons, it had been one of his habits to hike to the creeks and rivers that lay within walking distance of his house. He would throw everything he found along the shore into the water: plastic spoons, baby dolls, pencils, sticks, pieces of waxed cardboard – anything that would float, basically. Then he would try to hit the things and make them capsize, using stones and chunks of dirt. He called the game Bombardment. He remembered the long marches he had to take through the strips of high yellow grass that ran along the highway to get to the river, and the way the water always moved more rapidly toward the center than it did along the shore, and he remembered the day he caught a minnow in the shallows and poured it out of his hands into a Coke bottle, screwing the cap on tight, then slung the bottle end over end into the quickest part of the current. The minnow kept trying to swim away, thrashing around so that the bottle rocked back and forth on the river's surface. Lindell felt a giant surge of horror and pity rearing up inside him – poor fish – and so he threw off his backpack and waded into the water and almost drowned trying to reach the damned thing. It was moving too fast for him, though, and eventually he lost sight of it. He must have coughed up half a gallon of green water when he finally reached the shore. He spent the next three days trying to smack the rest of the river out of his ears.

What a sentimental pussy he had been.

It was amazing the things you would remember if you let your mind wander.

This particular river lay at the bottom of a gentle slope. As he plowed through the drifts of snow, the trash can swung and rattled in his arms, the plastic lining breathing in and out as it caught the breeze and let it go, and caught and let it go again. He could see the suspension bridge that joined the two sides of the river together, its cables white on black with the snow that was covering the steel. He was only a hundred yards or so from the water now. It was obvious that the still places closest to the shore had frozen over. At first he thought that the whole enormous river had crystallized, but when he listened he could make out a quiet swirling and spilling sound. As he looked more closely, he spotted a dark channel of water flowing down the middle of the ice.

He walked to the end of a wooden dock and climbed down the ladder. The ice was thick enough to support his weight, and it did not groan or snap as he made his way toward the center of the river. He paused when he reached the gash.

There was nobody in sight. The wind was blowing softly.

He had walked so far that he imagined some sort of ceremony might be in order, but then he realized what he was proposing – a ceremony for the disposal of a rinky-dink trash can – and he thought, To hell with it. He threw the trash can into the current and watched as it rolled over, gulped at the water, and sank a couple of inches, but kept gliding downstream. A few shreds of paper drifted out of the bag and snagged against the ice at his feet. He was able to read the worn from "sworn" and the cul from "culpability." Then he kicked at the ice, and the river tore the pieces away. The trash can kept drifting on.

His sense of relief was immediate. He felt the way a dam must feel when its gates are finally opened, the way a bomb must feel when its pin is finally tripped. The document had been the last – and, as far as he knew, the only – piece of tangible evidence connecting him to the whole end-of-the-world affair. As long as he and the others kept quiet about it, no one would ever know what had happened.

And so, in a sense, nothing had ever happened.

That was the way it worked.

The trash can had already vanished downstream. He couldn't see it anymore, not the slightest trace or sign.

He had ended up at the river purely by chance, and he had no other business to complete there, so he turned around and climbed the ladder back onto the dock.

The snow was just as thick on the uphill climb as it had been when he was going the other way, but he found it much easier to make the hike with both his hands free. Why, it suddenly occurred to him, had he taken the trouble to haul the trash can all that way when he could have removed the bag from the can and simply jettisoned the rest? It would have saved him a whole lot of effort, that was for sure.

Well, there was certainly enough idiocy in the city. Maybe it was catching.

There was no sun for him to track through the sky, but it did seem to him that the light filtering through the clouds was slowly growing dimmer. By the time he caught sight of the monument again, evening had fallen over the city. The streetlights flickered on and made everything glow: the bus benches, the fire hydrants, and the millions of leaves on the thousands of trees, carrying their hilly little deposits of white snow.

He was almost at the door of his building when he heard the sound of footsteps stealing up beside him. "Well, if it isn't Mr. Cups-Runneth-Over again. How are you doing, my friend? Has this freezing cold day of ours taken any of the son of a bitch out of you? Tell you what, then, why don't you loan me a few dollars? Just enough for a hot meal and a cheap cup of coffee. And 'cheap' is the operative word here, am I right? Am I? Yeah, you know what I'm saying."

Lindell lowered his head and pretended not to listen.

It never failed. He could walk halfway across the city, accomplish everything he set out to accomplish, wear his soles down, tire his legs out, and wash his mind clean of any sense of culpability, and when at last he had made it home and was ready to take the keys out of his pocket, there he would be, the man with the black gloves, holding his hands out and begging for change.