The Brief History of the Dead

TWELVE. THE BIRDS

The spare tent was missing. Laura made a careful search of the supplies, raking through the tools in the back of the sledge, but it wasn't there. Several times she accidentally snuffed the candle flame out with her sleeve and had to light the wick again. The shadows twitched back and forth in the bound space of the storage hutch, swaying against the walls. She had not taken the tent out at the station – she was sure of that. And she didn't think she had unloaded it into the cache she left on the ice shelf, though she was so tired by then that she might have done anything, frankly. But she was damned if she could imagine where else it might be. Back at the hut? Inside one of the crevasses?

It wasn't until she slipped the latch back into place that she remembered the accident she had sustained traveling down the tongue of the glacier toward the station, the open gash she had dammed over with a piece of plywood, the way she had stumbled about in the falling snow feeling for anything that might have fallen out during the crash. She was absolutely sure, suddenly, that that was where she had lost the tent. She might have been observing herself through the lens of a camera, watching her hands as they probed at the ground, missing the tent by a matter of inches. That was how clear it all was.

Just a few days ago, when she was climbing the great curved slab of polished snow that connected the ice shelf to the penguin roost, she would never have guessed that a lost tent would be so high on her list of worries. There had been so many other questions on her mind: What had happened to her skis? How would she navigate her way around the bottom of the cliffside to get to the knoll? Would she find the radio transmitter there? And even if she did, who would possibly be waiting at the other end to answer her?

But shortly after she topped the ridge, on her first night within listening distance of the penguins, her tent's soft coil gave out. She woke to find the walls rimed with frost, distinct blue-gray swirls of it that sparked and glistened in the candlelight. The sweat had frozen around the neck of her sleeping bag into a thick manacle of ice, and she had to break through it with a few hard jerks of her shoulders in order to climb out. Her clothing had hardened into a single bloomlike mass. She spent an hour or more pounding it loose and trying to fit herself inside. Then, when she was finally dressed, she dismantled the tent by hand. It took much longer than she would have expected. There was no way for her to get to the soft coil without ripping the fabric apart – and, in any case, she would have had no idea how to fix the thing without a replacement coil anyway – so she packed the tent away and used up the rest of the day threading the sledge through the cracks, rockfalls, and pressure ridges around the base of the cliff. Usually she was able to retain a little warmth from her night's sleep, but not this time. She was so much colder than she had been before. She would never have imagined that such a thing was possible.

The next night was worse, and the night after that was worse still. She had to rely on what little body heat she produced to keep herself warm, along with whatever fire she could make by burning the Primus stove, though she tried to use it no more than a couple of hours a day for fear of what would happen when the fuel was finally consumed. The coldest weeks of winter had set in, and the temperature had dipped to seventy degrees below zero – more than a hundred degrees of frost. Already the sweat she had generated inside her sleeping bag had turned it into a rigid, icy box. She was not sure how long it took her to thaw her way into the bag each night, but it couldn't have been less than an hour. She would jam her feet through the neck and slowly work her way down, stopping every few minutes to rub the muscle pangs from her legs until she melted a tunnel into the ice. She was barely able to squeeze her body inside.

Finally she would fall asleep, though from exhaustion rather than comfort. It was a poor, patternless sleep, not shallow so much as fragmentary, and it lasted no better than six hours. She would wake numerous times during the night with the force of her shivering and with the cramping that seemed to grip her piece by piece: her legs, her stomach, her shoulders. Then a time would come which she would decide to call morning, and she would start the day again, climbing out of her sleeping bag and plugging the mouth with her spare clothing so that it wouldn't freeze back together.

It took her four days to reach the rookery from the edge of the ice shelf, which was three days longer than she had expected. The ground at the base of the cliff was riddled with pits and crevices, barn-sized heaps of rock, slopes that rose suddenly from flat ice to insurmountable angles. Every time she thought she was approaching the knoll, she would come to some impossible place in the ice and have to turn back.

Often, she dozed off while she was marching. She wouldn't wake until she tripped over her own legs, or bumped into the side of the cliff, or put her foot through a rift or a crevasse. It was a miracle that she didn't kill herself.

Occasionally, when the wind dropped, she would hear the hollering of the penguins, a harsh, braying sound like a thousand doors opening on a thousand rusty hinges. Sometimes it seemed as though the birds were only a few feet away. But then the ice would rise up in front of her or the wind would begin to sob again and the sound would vanish.

Finally, a few hours into her fourth day in the harness, as she was pulling the sledge deeper and deeper into a ravine she could sense was slowly drawing together (another dead end, she thought), she discovered a break in the cliff. It was roofed over with snow, but it was just wide enough, just high enough, for her to fit the sledge through.

A rabbit's hole.

She ducked through the opening, came out the other side, and suddenly she was in the rookery. She couldn't believe it.

The penguins noticed her before she noticed them. They began gabbling and beating their paddles against their sides. The noise echoed against the barrier. There seemed to be fifty or sixty of them, maybe as many as a hundred, calling out to one another and rocking from side to side like fat black metronomes. They did not approach her, but they did not move away, either. They must have been used to the presence of human beings by now, she thought. After all, teams of scientists had been studying them for more than a century. As she was watching, one of them scooted into the sea, a long, curved finger of which reached all the way into the cove. It leapt back out clacking its beak around some little piece of food it had caught and waddled over to the others. The breeze carried the high, brave stench of their droppings. The smell was only barely softened by the cold.

The last free-swimming whale had been sighted more than thirty years ago, around the time Laura was born, and it was the general scientific consensus that the creatures had all but died out, just like the elephants and the gorillas and all the other great mammals before them. It was possible that there were a few isolated specimens still living in those scattered sections of the ocean that had not yet been cultivated for food, but it seemed unlikely. Certainly Laura had not seen any there in the Antarctic, and it had been her job to look. The continent still hosted herds of leopard seals and immense flocks of skua – though not, apparently, here in the cove – but it was the penguins who were actually thriving, living off the krill the whales were no longer alive to consume. They were as large as Laura had always heard they were. She wouldn't have been surprised if some of them weighed more than a hundred pounds.

The moon was partially hidden behind an exposure of black rock, but the light was still bright enough for her to make out the landscape. She was tired and sluggish, an old woman suddenly, frozen into her stiff old body, and she wanted nothing more than to lie down and close her eyes. But she knew that if she did she would fall asleep, and she couldn't allow herself to do that. Not yet.

She set off with the spare aerial in her hand. There was unusually little drift inside the knoll. Maybe it had all been compacted into ice. Or maybe a shift in the wind had blown it out to sea. In either case, it didn't take her long to find the remnants of the hut – a heap of cracked plastic, wood fragments, and twisted metal tucked inside a shallow scoop in the rock.

It looked as though the building had been crushed by a serac or an avalanche, some great chunk of ice and snow that had calved off the side of the mountain and smashed to pieces. If that was the case, though, it must have landed pretty damn hard. She could see pieces of jagged ice stretching in a great concussion ring around the hut – a thirty-foot halo of rubble. It must have made a sound like the detonation of a bomb when it landed. She could only imagine the upheaval it had caused among the penguins. She pictured a hundred birds diving madly into the ocean.

She felt infinitely tired all of a sudden. Her eyes fell closed, and she forced herself to open them. What was she looking for? Oh yes, the radio.

She made her way carefully through the debris, picking around in the wood and plastic and metal. She couldn't find any real trace of the transmitter, only a beaten aluminum panel that might or might not have been part of the housing. No doubt the thing had shattered into a thousand pieces when the building collapsed. Which meant that her trip across the ice shelf – the crevasse, the frostbite, the days and days and weeks of hauling – had been utterly meaningless.

Meaningless. Pointless. Hollow.

Sleepy Hollow.

Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.

She tossed the spare aerial onto the sediment heap, then thought better and retrieved it. What could she possibly use it for? A depth measure? An ice gouge? She didn't know, but she hated to throw it away. In truth, she hated to throw anything away. She had been accumulating unnecessary objects around herself all her life: knickknacks, old magazines, twigs she had snapped off of dying trees. Occasionally she would look at them, pick them up, even turn them over in her fingers, and she wouldn't be able to remember where they came from. They were like those skeletonized images from her early childhood that sometimes flashed into her mind when her thoughts began to drift, disconnected from anything that might put them into context. Walking into a brightly lit room with her hair tickling her forehead. Her father lifting a heavy jar out of a cabinet. A dog with a red bow pasted onto its nose. These knickknacks, these memories – where had she collected them all? Her apartment back home was practically an abandoned city of worthless objects: acorns, plastic keys, and ten thousand other things she had no earthly use for. But she had to admit that she liked having them there. At some point, when you were fourteen or fifteen, before you reached adulthood or knew who you were, you had to determine whether you were going to be the sort of person who held tight to every single thing that passed through your life, no matter how insignificant it was, or the sort of person who set it all adrift. Life was easier on the people who were willing to relax their grip, but she had decided to be the other sort of person, the sort who wouldn't let go, and she had done her best to live up to that decision.

There was no sign that Puckett and Joyce had made it as far as the rookery – no abandoned equipment, no sledge tracks. She doubted she would see them again. But then she had guessed as much long ago.

She set the tent up on a patch of hard ice, unloading the sleeping bag, the Primus stove, and the rest of her cooking supplies. Her hands were so numb that she was unable to drive the stakes into the ground. Instead, she used four rocks she found lying in a pile at the base of the cliff, weighing down the tent's inside corners.

She couldn't help thinking of the secret fortress she had played in the summer she was ten years old. That was what she had called it, "the secret fortress," though it was really just a free-standing public restroom in a section of the riverfront that had been fenced off and sold to developers. For a few months, though, until it was demolished to make way for an office complex, she and her best friend, Minny Rings, had gone there almost every afternoon to talk about boys and hide from their parents and plot their lives together. Sometimes they would pretend they were grown women, mothers with jobs and families, sometimes spies or basketball players or marine biologists. Laura still remembered the day they had ducked through the loose corner of wire fence and found the bricks and tile and porcelain of the fortress flattened into a surprisingly small heap. The bits and pieces had looked so flimsy and pathetic there, as though they never could have sheltered anything at all, not even a row of toilets, metal sinks, and hot air driers, much less the enormously complicated worlds the two of them had imagined. They had looked, in fact, like the debris of the hut did now, which must have been why she was thinking about them in the first place.

But before the fortress was knocked down, she and Minny had walked there nearly every day for the whole of June and July, excepting only the week Laura spent at summer camp. Usually they would meet at Minny's house, cut through the woods in back of the grocery store, and follow the long gray band of the access road to the river, balancing toe by toe over the rocks that lined the water. The fortress was hidden from the sidewalk by a thick belt of mixed trees, and as long as they were careful not to be seen beforehand, they could slip underneath the fence and make their way onto the construction site without being spotted. They were just two girls playing by the river. No one would interrupt them. The fortress's door was unlocked along with the high, tilting windows, and they never had any trouble getting inside.

"Which do you like better: summer or winter?" Minny would ask once they were alone. This was her favorite type of question. "Say it's a clear day. It isn't raining or snowing, and the sun is out."

"I don't know. Winter, I guess. If you ask me in the winter, I'll say summer, and if you ask me in the summer, I'll say winter."

"I choose winter, too," Minny said. "Here's another one. Who do you like better: your mom or your dad?"

"That one's tough. It's like winter and summer, I guess. I like whichever one isn't around at the time." Laura boosted herself onto the rim of the sink. "I can tell you one thing, I like your mom better than your dad."

"Me, too," Minny said. "My dad is a jerk. Do you know what he did yesterday? He dumped the ashtray over on purpose, right onto the carpet, and he made me clean it up. I didn't knock it over, and that's what I told him: 'I didn't do it.' But he said, T didn't ask whether you did it or not. I told you to clean it up, young lady.' He's always doing stuff like that. One time – " Minny cocked her head. "Hey, do you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"Listen."

Laura shifted her attention to the upper end of her hearing register. She heard it – a fine droning hum that beat rapidly at the air. She hopped down from the sink. The sound was coming from the skylight in the center of the room. She stood beneath it looking up, and Minny stood next to her. There was a wasp inside, bumping against the barrier of the glass. Its wings were a nearly invisible brown blur, and its stinger was floating beneath its body in the stately, motionless way of a diving bell on the underside of a boat.

"You're never going to get out through there," Laura said. She supposed she was talking to the wasp, though she knew better than to think that the wasp was listening. To Minny she said, "We should try to help it."

"No way. I am not touching a wasp."

"You don't have to touch it. You don't have to get anywhere near it. Just hold the door open, and I'll do the rest."

Minny glanced at the skylight. "If you want to get stung, I'm not going to stop you. I don't know why they put that thing in here to begin with. It's not like it lets any real light through." Then she went to the door and pulled it open, steering herself behind as she pivoted back toward the corner. Her voice came out from inside the closed triangle of space. "Okay. I'm ready."

"Chicken," Laura said.

"Fine by me," said Minny. "At least I won't get stung."

"Neither will I," Laura said. "I'm trying to help him." She knew she was being foolish, but she couldn't help herself. It was just that she felt so bad for the wasp: all it wanted was a way out, a way back into the sunlight, but the only thing it knew how to do was keep banging into the glass. She had to coax it away from the skylight. That was the first step. The problem was that it was too high for her to reach. She considered snapping at it with her T-shirt, but she was afraid that if she took the shirt off, the white skin of her chest and stomach would offer the wasp a target it couldn't resist. Instead, she took a paper towel from the bundle beneath the sink, worked it into a ball, and threw it at the wasp as gently as she could. Its wings buzzed, and its stinger curved angrily under its waist. She threw a second time, and then a third, aiming for the center of the glass.

After a few more tries, she managed to drive the wasp out of the skylight. It landed halfway across the room on the ceiling, dropped a few inches, and landed in the same spot again. She tried to reason with it. "Listen, I'm trying to help you. Just trust me and I'll let you outside."

From behind the door Minny said, "He can't understand you, you know."

"Yeah, well, most people say that cats can't understand you either, but you still talk to yours."

"Cats are smart. Wasps are morons."

"Not all cats are smart. Maybe not all wasps are morons."

But this one seemed to be. Laura kept trying to direct it toward the open door. Twice it settled on one of the windowpanes, tapping and vibrating and agitating from side to side until she was able to drive it back into the room. Occasionally it would make a dive for her and she would have to duck, covering her face with her hands. "Don't sting me, don't sting me, don't sting me!" The wasp always looped back up to the ceiling before it touched her.

The air carried a slight odor of ammonia that became much stronger above the grate in the center of the floor. It was the kind of smell that must have been like poison to a wasp – or to this one, at least, which steered carefully away from it. Whenever the wasp plunged toward her, Laura would retreat to the grate, and it would swerve aside.

Eventually, after what must have been dozens of paper towels, the wasp found the doorway of the building as if by accident. Suddenly it was gone.

The buzzing noise was pinched out by the breeze as it disappeared into the branches.

Laura sank against the wall, her face covered with sweat. "You can come out now," she said.

The door made Minny's voice sound unusually quiet. "Are you talking to him or me?"

"To you."

Minny shut the door. She walked over to Laura and leaned up against her, resting her arm on her shoulder. "That took just about forever," she said.

All these years later and Laura still remembered her answer: "Not forever, but long enough."

Which would make a wonderful epitaph, she now thought.

She was a world and a half away from the fortress, a world and a half away from everyone and everywhere she had ever been. The tent was impossibly cold. Tiny teardrop-shaped pendants of ice fell onto her chest and stomach as she shivered, and she had to brush them off before they melted against the heat of her skin. She could hear something rattling and cracking whenever she moved – either the sleeping bag or her own body. She was too tired, frankly, to tell the difference.

She knew that she had slept at least sporadically, because she could remember dreaming, and a person didn't dream unless she slept, did she? But she was so tired and so cold that the membrane separating her waking life from her sleeping life had become porous. Each side had begun to leak into the other. She found it increasingly hard to differentiate between the two.

She had dreamed that she was in her office at the Coca-Cola complex, for instance, watching a ribbon of sunlight slant across the floor, which meant that it must have been late afternoon, sometime in the spring. So why was she so cold, she wondered, and what was she doing in her sleeping bag? She wasn't supposed to sleep at work. It was the kind of thing that could get her fired. Maybe she was sick, she thought. Maybe she had been sent to the nurse's office at her high school, where the mattress crackled beneath her, gradually filling with ice. There was so much ice that the sheets crystallized in overlapping scales. She imagined that her mother was feeding her raisins as she lay in bed with a cold, dropping them one by one through the long straw that curved and dipped like a snake on its way to her mouth. "Open the tunnel," her mother said. "Here comes the train. Chooga-chooga-chooga-chooga – woo, wooo!" But the raisins were alive, and not actually raisins at all. Laura wasn't quite sure what they were. It was obvious, though, that they didn't want to fall. They put out dozens of black pincered legs to slow their descent. Thank God for the harness and the rope, she thought. The walls of the crevasse were so slippery, so steep. Who knew how deep it went? And the tent was like a hot-air balloon, barely tethered to the ground. She knew that she had to feed herself if she was ever going to get well again. She had to exercise and take better care of her body. That was what her mother had told her. Oat bran. Green vegetables. Bicycles. She dreamed that she was exercising on the treadmill at her gym, and then she felt something bulbous and hard shaking around in the bottoms of her shoes, and when she took them off and overturned them, her toes fell out like so many pebbles. And she woke up, and she was not surprised.

She had long since lost all feeling in her extremities. Even the nerves of her teeth had been killed by the frost. She would never have known she was clenching them together at all if it weren't for the spikes of tenderness she felt in her gums, thin needles of pain inside a surrounding aura of pressure. When she finally summoned up the resolve to check herself for frostbite, shortly after she returned from picking through the remnants of the hut, she discovered that the toes of her left foot were nothing more than ugly gray-black knots, beyond all promise of recovery. So were the fourth and fifth toes of her right foot. The tips of her fingers were in bad shape, too – terrible shape, really – along with her right cheek and the whole of her left ear. But she was able to treat them with a hemodynamic salve and bandages, and she had some small hope that they would get better in time.

How she would begin her trek back to the shelter, though, she couldn't imagine. She would never be able to make it over the shelf without help. And where on earth would help come from? The radio was broken, the sledge was broken, the entire world had been emptied out.

In addition to which she had taken no care to provide a return route for herself.

It was something of a miracle that she had made it as far as the cove in the first place. She wasn't sure she could find her way back onto the ice through the maze of cracks and pressure ridges that surrounded the rookery, much less to the far side of Ross Island. Hell, she was barely even able to find her way out of the tent at night. She would climb out of her sleeping bag sometimes in a high fever and grope for the opening as though she had never used her hands in her life.

Who was she? she thought. She was nobody special. When she died, there would be no one to remember her. The simple truth was that her strength – or whatever combination of muscle, luck, and willpower had driven her from the hut to the shelter and from the shelter onto the open ice and across the bay – was gone. Played out. Finished.

Finished. Finnish. Danish. Swedish. Meatball.

She gave a tiny, puffing laugh, but the effort hurt her stomach.

She could hear the emperors trumpeting beneath the barrier wall. The last time she went outside, to stake down a loose corner of the tent, they had been huddled together with their backs to the wind. Most of them were carrying eggs on the flaps of their feet, gripping them beneath the soft rounded bald patches on the undersides of their guts, which insulated the eggs from the cold. The ones that didn't have eggs were balancing egg-sized lumps of ice there, dead little worlds that they protected as avidly as though they were real. She had read about this behavior before, how the penguins were so desperate to incubate their young that they would seize on anything that even slightly resembled an egg. Stones, ice chunks, masses of snow – it didn't matter. Every so often one of the penguins nursing an actual egg would let go of it in order to dive beneath the water for food, and the others would drop their pieces of rock and ice and squabble over it until one of them had succeeded in tucking it under its gut. They always preferred the real eggs to the fake ones, which suggested that they were merely using the fake eggs as comfort devices, the way that mothers whose children have died will clutch the pillows they slept on or the stuffed animals they ported around with them, holding them to their faces and breasts in order to remember what it was like when they were alive.

Once, though, a behavioral scientist had placed a polished plastic canteen next to the penguins, a fluorescent orange sphere he filled with instant coffee, and they had abandoned their eggs – all of them, and all at once – to fight over it. They must have thought it was the most beautiful egg they had ever seen, the scientist speculated in his journal. The egg they realized they had always been waiting for. The egg of the future.

The rusty sound of the penguins' voices stopped suddenly, crested again, then slowly died away. Laura listened to the slapping of their wings as she lay shivering in the tent. She was hungry, or at least she knew she ought to be, but she couldn't steel herself to break out of her sleeping bag. The ice had frozen around the opening in a thick collar, and it would be a terrible struggle for her to push her way through.

If she didn't freeze to death, she was almost certainly going to starve to death, and she knew it.

Laura Byrd, the inscription would read, followed by the date she was born and the date she had died. Laura Byrd. Not forever, but long enough.

Filaments of frost and snow crossed the floor of the tent, blown into straight lines by the draft. Most of it had been swept inside when she opened the flap, but some of it was simply the accumulation of her own breath, which froze into a white powder as soon as it touched the air, settling on the floor in a long plume.

White powder. The Coca-Cola Corporation had initiated what they called their "white powder" campaign just a month or so before Laura left for Antarctica. The campaign had followed on the heels of the last big germ scare, during which a few thousand people around the country, mostly in small houses scattered along grayed-out highways, had found packages filled with the pale, almost colorless powders of smallpox, anthrax, and scarlet fever on their doorsteps. The deliveries had stopped after only a week, as suddenly as they had started, with no one imprisoned or apprehended. But soon after, people in their millions began receiving stiff cardboard envelopes in the mail that spilled a grainy white powder onto their hands when they opened them. Police departments, hospitals, and emergency warning centers were inundated with phone calls. Thousands of city and county governments activated their terrorism-alert beacons. The powder was quickly revealed to be a harmless laundry detergent with a coupon nested inside, which read, "Clean Up with the Coca-Cola Sweepstakes. Buy One Two-Liter Bottle, Get a Second One Free."

The corporation had been chastised for the recklessness of the sweepstakes by both Houses of Congress and the editorial pages of several hundred newspapers. They had released a statement apologizing for any disruption the campaign might have caused, and they had assured the public that such results were entirely unintentional. But sales of two-liter Coke bottles tripled in the weeks following the incident, and sales of all other Coca-Cola products doubled.

Guerrilla publicity, they called it.

Laura must have fallen asleep again, because when she opened her eyes she realized she was not listening to a discussion about the white powder campaign at all. She was not in the conference room that adjoined her office or anywhere inside the Coca-Cola complex. She was still lying in her tent. The glaze of ice had melted from around her eyes while she was sleeping, and the light was brighter than it had been in months. She could see everything with a remarkable clarity. The silver pan of the Primus stove, crusted over with a light brown syrup. The fanlike patterns of frost on the walls. The double row of black stitches marching over the dome of the tent like a procession of ants. There was a half-eaten bar of pemmican in the corner, notched with the impressions of her teeth, and an unopened bag of gra-nola beside it. A popcorn-shaped knot of ice had formed around the zipper of her sleeping bag.

She was taken aback not only by how much she could see, but by how much she could hear. It had never occurred to her that the light could improve her hearing as well as her vision, and yet undeniably it had. A penguin, for instance, was snapping delicately at its feathers. The fabric of the tent was booming in the wind. A vast tide of krill went swimming past beneath the ice.

Even her heartbeat was clear to her, regular and strong, as though she were holding her breath somewhere deep under water. The more closely she listened to it, the louder it seemed to become, until she could feel it keeping time throughout her body.

It was everywhere – in her toes, her stomach, even the tips of her ears. Amazing.

She shut her eyes and listened. Something unusual was happening to her. She was stretched around her heart, taut and firm like the skin of a drum, a perfectly sealed membrane that was beating, beating, beating. The heat of her blood was moving through her in millions of waves, more than she could possibly contain, and yet somehow she did contain them. She couldn't understand how she had become so big. She was as large as a forest, as large as a city. Her heart was the size of a lake, and she was swimming in it. She couldn't hear anything else. The sound filled her until she shook, and then it filled the tent, and then it filled the world.