The Brief History of the Dead

FOURTEEN. THE MARBLES

And the spring came, with the sun breaching the horizon and the wind lifting the snow off the ice and the bay popping and cracking like the frame of an old house. Shoals of fish traced the open water, and flocks of skua followed close behind them. Great chunks of glacier thawed and broke off into the ocean, carrying the blue-green ice of a thousand years ago. For a few hours each day the snow glistened like rubies in the drawn-out light of the sun, and for a few minutes, as the light grew stronger, it glistened like diamonds. No other spring in the world was anything like it.

It was a kind of twilight, though not the real one. The air was surprisingly warm, and for once Laura did not have to thrash around inside her sleeping bag to force her way out, because it had already melted down to the thinnest mesh around her. She lifted herself onto her elbows. Ten thousand loose threads slipped over her arms and shoulders and pooled together on the floor. They fell so softly that she could barely feel them moving over her skin. When she ran her hands through the threads, they rippled and separated, bending away from her fingers like water. A fish swam by beneath her. She had the notion that she could dive through the surface of the tent, parting the threads with her body, and wheel around to watch them close back together, that she could sink through the material until she forgot she was sinking at all, an anchor plunging deeper and deeper, but instead she opened the tent flap and stepped outside onto the crisp white snow.

The penguins were nowhere to be seen, nowhere even to be heard, though when she thought about it, she realized she could indeed hear them chattering hectically to one another, so they were somewhere to be heard after all, and she could see them huddled together at the base of the cliff, so they were somewhere to be seen. They had hatched their chicks and were warming them beneath the folds of their bellies.

The sun described a thin arch at the very edge of the sky, the moon a slightly larger arch at the opposite edge. The wind played softly over her skin. She was not wearing her jacket or her gloves, her boots or her socks, her pants or her undershirt – was not, as she understood it, wearing any clothing at all – and yet she had never been warmer or more comfortable. She wondered why she had ever been cold in the first place, why she had ever decided to be cold. Such a strange choice, she thought. And the world, this world, was all about choices.

It felt good to stretch her muscles. She flexed her fingers, combing them through her hair. There was still a trace of frostbite on the index finger of her left hand, a small plum-colored circle as perfectly formed as an adhesive bandage, and she peeled it off by the tail of red string that protruded from the top, dropping it at her feet, where it sank immediately into the snow and disappeared. She held the finger up to the fading light. Much better.

Scattered over the patch of wind-polished ice that surrounded her tent were the same delicate little puffs of white snow she had seen when she was sledging across the ice so many months ago. Why she hadn't noticed them before, she couldn't say. They were the size of marbles, the largest of them no bigger than a quarter. Some of them even seemed to present the same whorled feathering pattern as marbles, spreading open into blurred segments inside the glass. She tapped one of them with her big toe and it fell apart, spilling into its nearest neighbor, which also fell apart. They seemed so insubstantial that she wondered how they had ever managed to hold together at all.

A light wind came twisting through the cove, and the marbles drifted lazily about before settling back into the snow. It seemed as though they were regulated by a weaker gravity. One good gust was all it would take to carry them away, she thought, and the thought alone was enough to do it, for it wasn't long before she heard the wind sighing down from the cliff, picking up speed as it worked its way toward the rookery. She watched the marbles shudder as the first few hairs of the breeze brushed up against them, and then they floated up off the ice and began to tumble forward. Within seconds they were on their way. They moved with the same strangely purposeful spontaneity as a flock of birds, tacking from one side to another, crowding together and then fanning apart, yet always pressing forward. Where were they heading with such deliberation? she wondered. Where would they come to a stop? She wanted to know, and so she followed them.

The marbles guided her along at a brisk walk. Soon she had left the rookery far behind. The metallic quacking of the penguins faded slowly away until she couldn't hear them at all anymore, just the dimmest rasping sound at the furthest limit of her perception.

The marbles were rolling out over the bay toward the sun, which was higher than she remembered, and in a different quadrant of the sky. Every so often they would shuffle positions, the ones in front sliding to the edge of the pack while new ones drifted forward to take their places. She assigned names to her favorites, and then abandoned the names and assigned them sizes, and then abandoned the sizes and assigned them colors. The red one overtook the green one as she maneuvered around a rise in the snow. The blue one was falling steadily behind. She realized that she had abandoned her campsite without any of her supplies, without even her tent, but she brushed the thought away.

She didn't need her supplies. She couldn't imagine she would ever need her supplies again.

The bay had broken apart into huge chunks and floes that bobbed loosely in the deep water, swaying on every axis like plates spinning on wooden poles. Tremendous gaps and scissures opened between them as they rode their weight through the water. Small waves lapped quietly at their sides. The marbles sailed over the rifts as if they weren't there at all. Laura walked carelessly along behind them, watching the cracks seal shut as she approached. The floes came together with a great heavy precision, butting up against one another with a hollow thump, like boats sliding into their berths. They lingered just long enough to allow her to keep her stride before they floated apart again. She went on like this for hours.

Eventually, the marbles hit some sort of pocket or eddy, spinning in place, and she paused to take a breath. She looked behind her. She had left only the most superficial string of impressions in the snow. The footprints at her feet were so shallow they displayed a hollow curve along the instep, something like a barbell in shape. There was a long empty gap between the thick part of the sole and the five tiny jellybeans of the toes. It was as though she had been walking over a thin layer of sand on a bed of the hardest rock. The sand was an unmistakable Sahara yellow. It gave off a continuous warm pressure that rose up powerfully against her bare feet, though her soles were no longer sensitive enough to detect the million-some punctures of the individual grains. They were hardened by her years of desert walking. She was a sort of nomad. A dry wind swept in from the flatlands. The air around her seemed to shimmer. She could hear the flapping of wings beneath the sun as she followed the marbles out toward the dunes.

There were ripples in the sand like the ripples in a sheet of tin roofing. Once, walking through the trees behind her apartment building, she had found a sheet of rippled tin draped across the path beside the tennis courts. Dirt and leaves filled the corrugations, with weeds like bundles of stickpins growing through here and there, all round heads and long thin needles. A year later, the sheet was completely buried by the soil. She was unable to make out even the slightest rib or corner of it. The only sign that it was there at all was the clunking noise a certain section of the path made whenever her foot fell across it. For a moment or two she was there again, in that patch of woods behind her apartment building. It was night, and the headlights of a car entering the parking lot were coasting through the branches of the trees, slipping from limb to limb. First they illuminated one of the oak branches directly over her head, and then they slipped off the edge, leapt thirty feet through the air, and came together again on the bark of a fir tree. There was no difference at all between here and there, or if there was, the lights didn't recognize it.

Then she saw the marbles rolling over the leaves and she blinked and she was back in the dunes. There was a formation of white stone in the distance, knobbed and hunched to one side, one of those tall desert pillars that had been bleached of all its color by the sun. The marbles turned toward it, and she marched along behind them.

Sweat was pouring down her face, down her shoulders and her back, dripping off her fingers and the tips of her breasts. It accumulated at her feet as she walked, an immense clear lagoon reflecting a hundred wiry kinks of sunlight. Eventually the pool spread past its own boundaries and the sweat trickled away, draining slowly into the yellow sand. She watched it disappear.

The wind was at her back, and she felt good, invigorated. She felt as though she could follow the marbles for days without tiring a single muscle. The desert was much cooler at night, and the scorpions and lizards lay for hours on the flat brown rocks that were gradually releasing their heat back into the sky, poised there like statues. When the sun rose, the lizards crawled back into the shadows, but the scorpions barely moved at all. The formation she had set out toward – the pillar of white stone – was actually an arch. It was only the sidelong view that had made her mistake it for a pillar. The marbles crossed beneath the inverted U of the arch and circled around one of the legs to cross under it again, and then again, and then again, like leaves caught in a back current. They were a bright quivering silver in the light of the sun, a color with a thousand worms in it, even the black marble and the green one and the gray one.

It was on their fifth circuit around the leg of the U that she followed them under the arch and through the sliding glass doors of the shopping mall into the parking garage, which was the frozen bay, where a broken mass of ice floes kept tapping their bumpers and sawing past one another with metallic grinding noises.

She hopped over a fissure and continued on. The sand was snow again. The confused noise of the car horns faded away behind her. She wasn't sure how far she had come from her original campsite, but it must have been at least a hundred miles, if not more. She veered with the marbles around an upturned shoulder of sea ice. The snow squeaked beneath her heels.

As far as her eye could see, the bay was a bobbing field of pack ice, interrupted only by the occasional small iceberg. It was jigsawed with bending cracks of ocean water that shone brilliantly in the red light of the sun.

She was close enough to the open water that herds of leopard seals lay sluggishly about on the ice, groaning and whistling and bubbling and grunting. They were calling out to one another or to the universe, she wasn't sure which. Their voices were so animated that she almost believed she could understand them.

Let the fish swim through the traces, one of them said.

Where has the moon gone? Where have the stars? said another.

All worlds are one world, said a third.

And then Laura forgot what she was hearing, and the noise became exactly what it had been before, a din of barking. It was not the sort of barking that could ever be mistaken for the barking of dogs, but that was the thought that came to her mind. She thought in particular of the dogs that used to live in her neighborhood when she was a little girl. She remembered the way that when one of them, any one at all, would start barking – at a delivery truck, say, or a slamming door – all the others would take up the call in an expanding ring of yips and growls that made it seem as if there was nothing in the world but dogs: dogs that chased Frisbees and pawed at the dirt, dogs that charged after you as you rode past on your bicycle, dogs that stood over sprinkler heads on soft green lawns, lapping at the fans of water like puddles suspended in midair. The dogs didn't seem any larger than they had ever been, but it was undoubtedly true that she was weaving her way through their hair as she walked, hitching clumps of fur to the side as she marched over the ice floes.

Which meant that she and the marbles must have become smaller. Why was she always becoming smaller? she wondered. She put her foot down on a lump of ice that was also the ridge of the dog's spine and almost twisted her ankle. She would have to be more careful where she stepped in the future.

The fur along the dog's back, along with the great dented promontory of its head, blocked out most of the landscape. The sunlight came through in glints and flashes that took on the shape of the openings between individual shocks of hair, V-shaped windows that cracked apart for only a few seconds before they swung shut again. Every time she saw the light flickering out of the corner of her eye, she was compelled to jerk her head around. She was like a marionette. She couldn't help herself.

She thought of the blind man who used to stand in the atrium of the Coca-Cola building without a dog or even a cane, listening to the water as it poured down the wall of the fountain. He had jerked his head with the same instinctual twitch whenever something new caught his ear – footsteps approaching across the marble floor, the ding of the elevator coming to a stop beneath the mezzanine, trees rustling in the air-conditioning. He carried an old leather satchel that he used to set down at his feet, where it would spread its lips open like a dying lily, and whenever people dropped their coins inside, he would dismiss them with a wave of his hands, saying, "I didn't ask for that. I'm no beggar," before he emptied the satchel into the wishing pool. He was the kind of person she saw almost every day, then promptly forgot about until she saw him again.

The dog she was riding was not blind, though. It went racing after something it had spotted on the ice. She had to cling to its fur with both her hands to keep from falling over. The marbles trembled and bounced against its tallowy white skin, just visible between the roots of its hair.

Then the dog stopped, hunched over, and wrenched its head to the side as though it had caught a rabbit in its jaws. She slipped down its back and tumbled off onto the ice, landing on her butt.

She picked herself up and brushed the snow from her body, collecting the crystals in her palms and pouring them into the fountain over the thousands of silver coins, which shimmered in the light of the atrium. The still water reflected the scarves and curtains of the aurora. She watched them snap and flicker above the coins. Then she set off down the corridor that connected the atrium to the public relations building. The marbles were still rolling along in formation, though the air in the corridor was dead-motionless, even in the wake of her body, and she could no longer be sure what was driving them forward. Plainly it wasn't the wind.

There were doors to either side where she heard the routine sounds of business being conducted, sounds so familiar to her that they had long since lost all meaning. A woman was dictating a report into her computer's voice-recognition speaker. A man was pacing the floor of his office as he spoke on the telephone. A copy machine was processing a stack of papers, its armature sliding back and forth beneath the glass with a zippered halting noise. All the doors in the corridor were closed, and when Laura tried to open them, she found them locked.

She kept walking down the hallway. She passed by a bank of elevators and through an empty reception area where the water cooler beside the couch gave up a wobbling bubble of oxygen. It was hard for her to believe that she had spent so much of her life in this building, or in other buildings just like it, walking around inside rooms that were thirty or forty or fifty feet above the earth, whose walls and floors and ceilings had been constructed around spaces where no human being had ever set foot just a few years before.

The lead marble – she had forgotten its name – turned down a corridor that led toward an open flight of stairs, and the other marbles flocked around behind it. Without hesitation they took the stairs toward the roof, bumping from step to step like a colony of ants fording a stream across one another's backs. She began to climb up after them. It was twenty flights or more before she and the marbles reached the building's top floor, but she made the climb with surprising ease. She couldn't speak for the marbles, but she herself felt strong and vigorous, she might even say athletic. There was so much power in her body, more than there had been at any time since her adolescence. It was as though all her months in the Antarctic had never happened at all. She pushed at the fire door that was positioned at the top of the stairs and stepped out onto the roof.

The building beneath her was water. All its rooms were water, and all its hallways were water, and she was sailing across it on a great raft of ice. The fire door slowly shut behind her, drawing back with a long, hissing exhalation. She heard it lock into place. The marbles were all huddled together at the leading edge of the ice floe. They looked like passengers peering over the rails of a ship. Every so often, the wind would send one of its ligaments whipping up at them from the ocean, and two or three of them would go soaring up over the others to land at the back of the crowd.

Laura adjusted the sails on the ice floe and took hold of the wheel. When she spun it to starboard, the floe nosed out toward the stars and the open water, so she swung it back to port, and the floe drifted smoothly and slowly back toward the pack ice that skirted the land mass. It was several hours before she finally docked, sliding into the hollow between two loosely joined sheets of ice, at which point she let go of the wheel and walked off the end of the floe without dropping anchor. The new ice rocked slightly beneath her weight. But it remained afloat, and after a few steps, she found herself walking on a more solid foundation. The marbles were following her now, coasting and whirling over the snow, above and between the staggered lines of her footprints. Occasionally they would roll against the backs of her feet – a quick cold tap. And every now and then one or two of them would go slewing out in front of her in a fishhooking sort of curve, but they never ventured too far ahead.

The sun and the moon had been resting at opposite ends of the sky for so long that it was impossible for her to tell what time of day it was, but she decided she would call it afternoon, so afternoon it was. Late afternoon, she would guess. She had heard once that late afternoon – three-thirty or four o'clock – was when the human body temperature was at its coolest, and sure enough, when she pressed her palm to her forehead, she found that she was freezing. Her skin threw off the dry chill of a metal serving tray left outside on a winter night. She was cold enough to feel the contours of her skeleton inside her body. Yet she was perfectly at ease, peaceful even, with a wonderful looseness in her hands and toes and her blood completely still inside her. She felt as though she were sleeping in her bed at home.

When the ice sheet she was crossing fell off into the water, crumbling to pieces along the left side, she skipped over the margin onto the ice floe bobbing next to it. She was a dancer of sorts. She had always wanted to be a dancer. The gap where the ocean lay was an orchestra pit, and she could see the violinists sawing away beneath the water, the percussionist pounding on his big bass drum, the limb of the trombone sliding out, then consuming itself, then sliding out again. She rose onto her toes to leap over a chunk of broken ice. The music blossomed from the water to carry across the frozen bay. For a moment, she thought she was going to lose herself in it, in the sway of the strings and the reverberations of the horns – she had always known that she could lose herself in a piece of music – but then the breaking noise of a cymbal became the crack of a gunshot, and a flock of birds lifted noisily up from the ice, and she watched them take off and bank toward the ocean in a geyser of wings.

How long had she been walking toward the sun? It seemed like weeks since she had found the ruins of the hut alongside the rookery and fallen asleep inside her tent and then woken in a pool of red threads and shed her clothing and set off after the marbles.

Though perhaps it had been only a few minutes.

What was clear was that something had happened. Her sense of time had broken apart into two equal halves and fallen away from her like the shell of a walnut.

She found herself forecasting the colors the sun would make on the ice. A gold like the pollen of ragweed flowers. A pale green like the green of Easter-egg dye. At first the colors seemed to blossom open just an instant or two before she was able to put a name to them, but a little experimentation convinced her that the process was exactly the reverse: the thought preceded the color. It was a game. She pictured the creamy off-yellow of her bathroom walls, and a half second later there it was on the ice. Seven shades of blue poured into her head, and a moment later she was threading her way right through the center of them. She could shuffle the colors at will. It was like her word association game – one word, one color, leading inexorably to the next, by a process that was largely but not wholly within her control, a process of whim and chance and improvisation. Everything depended on the fluctuations of her mind, and her mind was not entirely her own.

Those were the rules. She was beginning to understand them.

When she looked up from the colors on the ice, she saw something standing in the distance, just to the left of the sun: a glittering city, with buildings of glass and stone and steel that rose high above the streets. She saw the clean line of a river cutting through the center, wooden docks piercing the water and grass and trees growing along the banks. A suspension bridge spanned the river from one bank to the other, resembling from this distance the torn silver web of a spider. She was too far away to see how much traffic was on the streets, or indeed whether there was any traffic at all, but the spokes of a railway station shone unmistakably beneath the blue sky. Parks and arcades lay sprinkled between the buildings. An immense cloud of birds wheeled in the air.

She lost sight of the city when she dipped beneath a hill. By the time she climbed to the top and was able to see to the horizon again, it had disappeared. She turned a full circle, but still she couldn't find it anywhere.

It must have been a mirage. She had forgotten about mirages.

The sun was bigger than it had been when she started her walk, a terrible white sphere that took up half the sky. It was so bright that she imagined she could hear it sizzling. It gave off the sound of an egg sputtering in a frying pan, an egg that was just beginning to go crisp at the edges, and because she was hungry she poured the egg off onto a plate and ate it with a knife and fork, but she did not eat the sun, and she did not stop walking.

The marbles were some twenty or thirty yards ahead of her now, a hundred teetering balls, so very small inside the sealed arc of the sun. Their shadows seemed to burn themselves into the air. They were right on the verge of disappearing.

How far she must have come to make the sun so large.

How close she must have drawn to the horizon.

Most of the ice had already melted away, and soon she was leaping from one chunk to another, resting barely long enough to feel the pieces bob beneath her. Then the ice was gone altogether, and she was traveling directly across the surface of the water. Plants with long green fronds composed slow figure eights beneath her feet. Small fish darted past in the crimped light.

She had finally hit her stride. She imagined she could walk forever.