The Brief History of the Dead

THIRTEEN. THE HEARTBEAT

Once again Minny couldn't sleep. How many nights had she lain in bed beside Luka, barely touching his back with the side of her arm as she waited for the darkness to pull her under? Not every night, but often enough. She had tried all the various remedies people suggested – melatonin, red wine, exercise, chamomile tea – but none of them seemed to work. They made her body drowsy, but not her mind. And her mind, let's face it, was the problem. Her mind was a roulette wheel, rattling and spinning in endless circles, and there she was standing beside it, watching the bright silver ball of her consciousness as it bounced first one way and then another.

That was what insomnia was, after all – an excess of consciousness, an excess of life. Ever since she could remember, she had treated her life as an act of will, the you-can-do-anything-you-set-your-mind-to philosophy, but she couldn't will herself to fall asleep. The only way to fall asleep was not to care whether you fell asleep or not: you had to relinquish your will. Most people seemed to think that you fell asleep and then started dreaming, but as far as Minny could tell, the process was exactly the reverse – you started dreaming and that enabled you to fall asleep. She wasn't able to start dreaming, though, because she couldn't stop thinking about the fact that she wasn't already asleep. And anything that called her attention to that fact made it more likely that she would keep thinking about it, and a million little snowdrops of nervous tension would bud open inside her, and thus she wouldn't start dreaming, and thus she wouldn't be able to sleep. What a mess.

She listened to Luka breathing in the slow rhythm of his own sleep. She had heard the sound so many times that she could have identified it in a police lineup. Listen carefully, ma'am. Take your time. Is this the sound of the man you're looking for? "Yes, that's him, officer. He says he loves me, but I don't know why."

Which was exactly what he himself had said the last time she pressed him for a reason: "I love you, but I don't know why. I just do. Shouldn't that be enough?"

And it should have been, but the question kept needling at her.

One, two, three – sleep, she said to herself, but of course it didn't work.

This restlessness of hers, the way her mind kept turning over on itself as she lay in bed – it was kind of like the city, wasn't it? The entire population was suffering from an excess of consciousness, an excess of life. That was her diagnosis. They were passing out their days in a place somewhere between life and death, in that drifting stage after the lights went out but before sleep came over them.

A city of people who were waiting to dream.

A city of insomniacs.

She moved her feet in slow, overlapping circles, a nervous gesture she had picked up around the time her parents divorced, when she was fifteen years old and just beginning high school. The friction warmed her feet, which were always a bit cold. She found the repetitive swaying motion comforting. Her mother used to pass by her bedroom and see her rocking back and forth beneath the blankets and shut the door, chastising her, "If you can't respect the other people living in this household, at least have some respect for your own body, dear," which always made Minny laugh. She loved her mother and still saw her once or twice a week. Every so often, she even caught sight of her father, eating in some cafeteria or moving around on the far side of a crowd, maybe balancing a pack of playing cards on the rim of a glass in the back room of a bar. He always greeted her with the same look of surprise mingled with terror, then fled before she could say anything to him. Shortly after the divorce, he had put a gun to his chest and committed suicide. He must have imagined that he was escaping from everything he had ever known. Certainly he had never expected to see his daughter again. She didn't blame him for running away.

She understood that she was better off than any number of other people in the city. Take Luka, for instance, who hadn't seen either of his parents since he had died, or at least since she had met him – just the two or three neighbors he had known and the handful of students he had taught during the one short summer he had spent with Laura.

Minny heard him mumble something in his sleep, and she turned over onto her other side. Her ear was resting on the palm of her hand, which was wedged between her head and the pillow. For a moment she thought she heard someone knocking on the door. Then she realized it was only the sound of her heart beating. And then she realized that it couldn't be the sound of her heart beating.

She had never been one of those people who went around the city with an invisible heart keeping time in her ears. She had always assumed that such people were undergoing some sort of mass hallucination. They had fixed their minds on something they either wished for or remembered (Luka would have teased the pun out: something they had learned by heart). And then, abracadabra, they imagined it was actually there.

But the beating she heard was unmistakable. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

She lay there listening to the sound for what must have been hours, and when finally she opened her eyes again, the light had risen outside her window and it was just as unmistakably morning.

The heartbeat did not go away. Several days passed and still Minny could not stop listening to it.

As it turned out, she wasn't alone. No one in the city failed to notice it. It seemed to fill the air like a soft rain of ashes – so abundant that it revealed the smallest motions of the wind, yet so light that it barely tingled as it touched their skin. Everywhere she went, Minny saw people reflexively putting their hands to their chests as they waited alone in the lobbies of movie theaters or sat talking to one another in crowded restaurants. She knew that they were feeling for that old familiar rhythm.

Luka wrote about the phenomenon one day in the Sims Sheet. He headlined the article, HEART BEATS, PEOPLE LISTEN. It was a man-on-the-street piece, profiling some half dozen people he had confronted with a pair of questions on the subject: What did the heartbeat mean? And, Where did it come from? As usual there was no consensus of opinion. A man who identified himself as Martin Campbell said that the pattern of the heartbeat was familiar to him, but he couldn't figure out where he remembered it from. He was only sure that it made him want to go to sleep. A woman named Linda Terrell said, "Don't you know? There's a giant heart buried beneath the subways. Take your shoes off. You can feel it beating in your toes." One man claimed that the heartbeat was his own, though he would not explain how he knew this to be the case.

"Whatever the answer," the article concluded, "this reporter refuses to believe that the sudden rise or recurrence of the sound is insignificant – though what its significance may be I leave it for you, the reader, to judge."

One thing was certain, and that was that everyone in the city was interested in the topic. For the first time since Minny had met Luka, they handed out every single copy of the paper that morning and found only a few of them balled up in the trash cans as they left.

Afterward, before they went home, they decided to share a late breakfast at Bristow's. The restaurant was full, and Minny left Luka standing in the lobby while she went to the restroom. When she came back, he was talking to a woman about the condition of the roads.

"I would say I've seen at least one traffic accident a day ever since the ice started falling," the woman told him. "Why, just on the way over here, I watched someone run smack into the side of a mailbox. That crumpling sound! Have you ever been in a car accident?"

He had, of course. The night they met, when they believed they were the only people in the city – the two of them and the blind man, that is – he had told Minny the story of how he had died in a highway accident. He said that he had lost control of the wheel and felt himself being jarred loose from his body. She had never forgotten the tingle that ran over her skin as he described it. But he answered the woman with, "Never. I guess I've been pretty lucky."

"See, for me it's been one accident after another," the woman said. "One time my accelerator went out, and I could only get my car to drive in reverse. I literally can't tell you how many traffic citations I've gotten. And then I rear-ended somebody once just trying to see how fast I would have to go to get a grasshopper to blow off my windshield. You know how sometimes you've got these questions in your head? Well, the police officer was sympathetic, but he said he had to give me a ticket anyway."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Luka said.

A table emptied out, and they left the woman waiting at the door. Bristow, the owner of the restaurant, showed them to their chairs and filled their water glasses. After they had placed their order, Minny asked Luka, "Why didn't you tell her about the accident?"

He stirred the ice in his glass. "She's a complete stranger, and mostly crazy would be my guess. I died, remember? That car accident was one of the three most important things that ever happened to me – probably a close second, right after my birth. I'm not going to tell just anybody about it."

"But you told me about it the same day we met. And I was a complete stranger."

"You were a complete stranger," he agreed. "And you're also mostly crazy. But you were never just anybody."

This was the kind of thing he would say every so often, a tight little knot of sentences, like the coil of rubber at the center of a golf ball, that would burst open in a spray of contradictory implications as soon as she tried to pick it apart. What did he mean? Did he have something serious in mind? Or was he just being cryptic for the sake of being cryptic, clever for the sake of being clever? She could never tell. He himself seemed to see such conversations as a kind of affectionate game. Sometimes she would try to play along with him, but she was not very good at it, and they both knew it. She felt clumsy, thick-witted. Usually, instead of joining in with him, she would try to come up with a topic that would shift the mood of the conversation onto a slower, steadier course, one she was sure she could follow. A walk instead of a dance, was how she thought of it. This was just one of the many reasons she couldn't stop asking him why he loved her.

"Or how's this?" he amended his answer. "You were a stranger, but you were never complete." He laughed.

"Did I tell you I saw the blind man yesterday?"

It had the effect she wanted: his smile sank back into his face, and his eyes took on a look of simple curiosity. "No, you didn't. Where was he?"

"He was having an argument with a ticket vendor. I stopped and asked him if he was all right, and he said he was tired of remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember. Those were his exact words: 'remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember.' I think I might have been on the forgetting-everything-he-wanted-to-remember end of the spectrum. When I told him who I was, he said he was pleased to meet me."

"Yeah, he didn't remember me the last time, either. So that makes – what? – six for me and eight for you?" "Nine for me, thank you very much." "Nine it is."

The blind man had disappeared back into his solitude soon after they found their way to the monument district, and ever since then, they had seen him only in passing. They had made a bet that the first one to spot him ten times would win an unspecified favor from the other, collectible at any time. The blind man was something of a hermit, though, or at least he took a different set of streets than they usually did, and weeks would sometimes pass between one sighting and the next. Minny wasn't surprised that he didn't remember her. When she thought about those first few days with Luka, before they had heard the gunshots, it was tempting for her to imagine that the blind man had never been there at all. Luka had been the Adam to her Eve, the Friday to her Robinson Crusoe, the Master to her Margarita. None of them were stories that left room for anyone else.

On the other side of the restaurant, Minny saw Laura's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Byrd, eating a breakfast of what looked like scrambled eggs and toast. Mrs. Byrd was using her left hand, Mr. Byrd his right. Their other hands were concealed behind a salt and pepper caddy on the back side of the table, where they could lace their fingers together without anybody watching. They looked like two embarrassed teenagers on a first date. And, simultaneously, they looked like an old couple who had been holding hands so long that they no longer distinguished between the times when they were touching and the times when they weren't. It was sweet.

Minny had seen the two of them again and again since she had arrived in the city, had even waved to them every so often, but never once had they recognized her. This was understandable. After all, she had certainly changed a whole lot more in the years since she and Laura had been best friends than they had.

When she stopped to consider it, she realized that she probably hadn't thought about Laura more than fifteen or twenty times during the whole of her adult life. She had never been the kind of person who was haunted by memories of her past, or at least she hadn't been that kind of person before the virus and the news coverage and the sight of all those bodies propped up in the swaying green grass. But then she had died, and she had found out about Laura's fling with Luka, and all of a sudden she was thinking about her all the time. There wasn't much for her to remember, just a few stray images of the two of them playing house and pretending to walk a tightrope and then something about a butterfly and a fortress.

The man she was in love with and her best friend from – what? – third grade?

It was all too strange.

After they had finished eating and took care of the check, they gave up their table to a man in hiking boots and a business suit. It was snowing again, and Minny slipped her hands inside her pockets as they stepped out into the cold.

Luka hooked his arm around her waist and pulled her close to him as they crossed the street, his hand under the tail of her jacket. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"Mm-hmm."

"You seemed a little quiet back there for a while." "I know. I was just thinking." "About what?"

"About you. About Laura."

Luka put his fingertips on the hip of her dress, by which he meant to say, You shouldn't worry so much. Though what he actually said was "Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Trouble."

"I don't love trouble," Minny sniffed.

" 'Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Suffering,' then."

"I don't love suffering, either."

"Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Coffee."

She bumped him with her shoulder, playfully. "I can't argue with that, I guess."

There were places where the snow had risen so far toward the roofs of the parked cars that they stretched down the side of the road in a series of identical, oddly shaped lumps, like the knots of someone's spine. The sidewalks were slippery with ice. Maybe it was just the banks of snow piled alongside every major lane of traffic, but sometimes it seemed to Minny that she was traveling through a city of tunnels, just another one of the mole people. The sensation was particularly strong on those gray, dismal days like today, when the sun failed to show itself behind the clouds.

She and Luka had established their own little circuit of stores, buildings, and restaurants soon after they decided to haul his newspaper equipment from his old office to his new one and move in together. It had been a long time since either one of them had ventured more than ten or fifteen blocks away from their apartment. But they had heard the same reports as everyone else. The snow had sealed the monument district off from the rest of the city. Luka had even written about it in a special double issue of the Sims Sheet. The district was framed by the river on one side and by a sliver of park and a pair of six-lane roads on the others. Beyond those borders the snowdrifts had become so high that the ground was almost impassable. All you could see were the corners of a half dozen billboards and the upper floors of a few tall buildings. It was as though the city were slowly digesting itself.

The man who always carried the signs with the religious messages printed on them passed by Minny and Luka with a placard that read, FOR OUT OF THE ABUNDANCE OF THE HEART, THE MOUTH SPEAKETH. He stopped and asked them if they had heard the sound.

He was talking about the heartbeat, Minny presumed. "I've heard the sound," she said.

"Yes," the man said, "we have all heard the sound, for it is the beating of His Sacred Heart."

"Is it?"

"He's coming soon. He'll be carrying my Bible for me." "I'm glad," Minny said.

The man flinched when she reached out to pat his arm, so she put her hand back in her pocket. "You stay warm now," she told him, and she and Luka slipped around him and across the intersection and finally through the door of their building.

Luka spent the rest of the afternoon working on the next day's edition of the newspaper while Minny read a novel by the light of the table lamp in the living room. The days, unlike the nights, passed quickly, and before she knew it she had finished the novel, and he had picked up dinner from the Korean restaurant down the street, and the two of them were standing at the kitchen counter eating noodles and kimchi out of waxed cardboard boxes. He was a journalist, with a journalist's dining habits. And because she had never developed any firm dining habits of her own – cleaning habits, yes; reading habits, definitely; dining habits, no – she had been happy to adopt his when they moved in together.

"Which do you like better: the idea of the past or the idea of the future?" she said a few minutes later, as he was packing the leftovers away in the refrigerator.

"Not this game again."

"The idea of the past or the idea of the future?" she insisted.

"You sound like an optometrist testing lenses. This one – or that one. This one – or that one."

"You're not going to answer me, are you?"

"Well, the contest is rigged, in my opinion. But I guess I'll say the future. My real answer is the present."

"Me, too. The future. Which do you like better: this world or the other?"

"A real life-or-death decision, huh?" he joked.

"This world or the other?"

"This world," he said. "This world all the way."

He closed the refrigerator and winked at her, taking two big steps across the kitchen floor.

And then it was night, and she was in bed, and she fell asleep right away for once, though the next night she lay awake for hours thinking about what it would have been like if the two of them could have had a child (and here was a question: if she could have given their child a certain amount of each of the five virtues – health, kindness, intelligence, charm, and beauty – how would she have distributed them, and in what proportions?), and the night after that about the hotel where she had died, the quarantine at the edge of the parking lot, and the warm glow of the vending machine in the lobby.

She wasn't exactly sure when the heart stopped beating.

It might have been a few nights later, when she got up at two o'clock to walk around in the blue half-light of the apartment and heard a dripping sound that turned out to be the icicles melting outside the window. It might have been the next morning, when for the first time in weeks the sun came out burning hard and the birds reappeared from wherever they had been keeping shelter. It might have been the day after that, or the day after that, or even the day before. All she knew for certain was that there came a moment when she realized she could no longer hear the pulse that had accompanied her every waking moment for so long, and she felt as if something had died.

It happened like this: She was handing out newspapers with Luka when there was a short lull in the traffic, and suddenly it was quiet enough for her to notice the stillness in the air. She realized right away that something was wrong, something was missing. A fist seemed to tighten inside her stomach. "Listen," she said to Luka.

He fell quiet for a moment, then whispered, "What is it I'm supposed to be listening for?"

"It isn't there anymore."

"What isn't there?"

She gave him a hint: "Bump, bump. Bump, bump. Bump, bump."

His expression shifted through three distinct stages – first confusion, then dawning recognition, and finally, as the weights tumbled into place, full understanding. "Hey, you're right," he said. "It's gone."

"I know it's gone. I knew it all along."

"You 'knew it all along'? What does that mean?"

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to say that she had known since the beginning of their conversation – that that was all she had meant – but the truth was that she had something deeper in mind, something she couldn't quite pin down, and she didn't want to lie about it. "I don't know. Honestly. I didn't realize I was going to say that."

"Understandable," he said. "In fact, understood."

First she smiled, and then suddenly she found herself fighting back tears. She turned away from him so that he wouldn't notice. It had something to do with her sense that nothing was permanent, nothing would last. Hearts stopped beating. People put guns to their chests. There was no one and nothing she could ever know well enough to make it stay. It had been one of her chief preoccupations during the last few years of her life: the notion that there was not enough time left for her to really get to know anyone. Most people would say it was ridiculous. She understood that. She was only in her mid-thirties, after all. But whenever she would come into contact with someone new, someone whose stories she didn't already know by heart, sooner or later that person would start talking about days gone by, and she would get the sad, sickening feeling that too much had already happened to him and it was far too late for her to ever catch up. How could she ever hope to know someone whose entire life up to the present was already a memory? For that matter, how could anyone hope to know her? The way she saw it, the only people she had any prayer of knowing or being known by were the people who had been a part of her life since she was a child, and she hardly even spoke to them anymore. Just her mother and a friend or two from high school, and that was about it. As for everybody else she met, well – there were too many shadows behind a person and there was too little light ahead. That was the problem. And there was no force in the world that would remedy the situation. People talked about love as a light that would illuminate the darkness that people carried around with them. And yes, Minny was capable of loving, but so what? As far as she could tell, her love had never improved things for her or anyone else, so what good was it? She could never rely on it. It weighed no more than a nickel. It was only after she died and met Luka that the vistas of time seemed to open back up for her, and she began to think that maybe she could know someone else as well as she knew herself – that her love might be enough to make a difference, after all.

But sometimes she would start to feel the death in things again, and that old doubt would come washing back over her, and she would fill with the terrible familiar fear that nothing had changed at all. She could never be whole in the eyes of anyone else. No one else could ever be whole in her own eyes. She had known it all along.

"Are you okay?" Luka asked her, and when she nodded, he said, "You seemed to be someplace else there for a minute."

"I'm all right," she said.

She wouldn't ask him the question. She wouldn't let herself.

The traffic had picked up again, and there was no longer enough silence in the air for them to listen for the beating of the heart. They handed out the last of the newspapers. Then they walked back home over the wet sidewalks, the flattened grass, and the heaps of melting snow.

It was another day of reading and staring out the window for Minny, cut off entirely from the world. Usually Luka would ask her to come along with him while he scouted the city for reports he could use in the newspaper, but she had come to sense when he wanted to be alone, and today was one of those days. It could be a pleasure to walk the pavement with only your own thoughts for company. She understood that.

After he left, she opened the window to air out the room, and the trickling sound of so much ice and snow melting seemed to enter the apartment from all directions at once. If she had closed her eyes, she might have imagined that she was standing in the middle of some tropical cave, the moisture of the forest percolating down through infinite layers of stone to drip into a hundred little pockets of water. But her eyes were wide open. A few people were walking by down below with their jackets slung over their shoulders. Clumps of snow fell from the trees and the hoods of the cars, astonishingly white in the light of the sun. A couple of birds had landed on her ledge and then flown away. She could see the hieroglyphs of their footprints in the snow.

She must have gone back to the couch and fallen asleep after that, because soon Luka was standing over her with his hand on her forehead. Occasionally, in the middle of the day, when all of the pressure had fallen away, she would sit down to relax for a few minutes and open her eyes to find that she had dozed off for half the afternoon. It was one of the side effects of her insomnia.

She kept her eyes closed. She knew without thinking what Luka was going to say, because he had said it so many times before: "Wake up, Sleeping Beauty."

"What time is it?" she asked.

"Early," he said. "It was a light news day – just the heartbeat and the weather. Speaking of which, I thought we could go outside and enjoy the sun for a while."

She felt a breeze on her skin, and she propped herself up on her elbows to see where it was coming from. "I left the window open," she said. Then she turned to Luka. "Can I ask you something?"

"Uh-oh."

"No, no, it's nothing like that. You have birth and then you have the car accident, right? So what's the third most important thing that ever happened to you? You never told me."

There was a pause as he sat down, lifted her gently by the shoulders, and put her head in his lap. It was as though she had asked him her question again – why do you love me? – and he had decided to answer her as he always did, by not answering at all.

He spent a few moments stroking her hair with the back side of his hand, then flipped it over by the roots so that it covered her face in a thick curtain.

"Now you look like a caveman," he said.

It was so ridiculous that she had to laugh. He was always saying things like that – at the least expected times, in the least expected places. No one else had ever been able to make her laugh like he could. No one else had ever tried so hard. No one else had ever known her well enough.

Not a soul.