The Brief History of the Dead

FIFTEEN. THE CROSSING

It soon became apparent to the blind man that the city was changing. The birds had returned to the air in greater numbers than ever before, and at times the vertical space around him seemed to warp or shift in some way so that he imagined he heard them all calling out from the exact same spot, a great mass of voices clustered together in a tree or on the railing of a balcony. Though the phenomenon never lasted for longer than a few seconds, it was quite distinct. The notes the birds gave out were sharp, multiangular – sudden little whistles that cut across one another like thorns.

He had heard this sound before. It was the saddest sound in the world: the sound of something that thought it was free but had come bumping up against the walls of its enclosure.

The birds might have been the first sign of the city's transformation (they were definitely the first that he noticed), but there were certainly others. The last of the snow ran to water, and it ceased to rain. The wind picked up speed one day, then reversed directions, and finally stopped blowing altogether. Once, the blind man accidentally kicked a pebble through a subway grate and never heard it hit the bottom.

He knew, then, that the topography of the city was changing, but he didn't know how, and he didn't know why, until the first few people came back from the edge of the monument district and the word began to spread. The rest of the city, that portion of it that lay beyond the park and the river, was no longer there. It had melted away along with the snow.

The blind man heard the story from a man who was holding court in the center of the shopping plaza. "I was thinking I would just go for a ride, you know, really open up and see what kind of speed I could do." His voice was coming from a crouch. He was spinning the pedals of his bicycle, then yanking them forward to make the chain seize short against the sprockets. "Well, I got as far as the six-laner at the other end of Park Street, and then I had to turn back around. The road wasn't there anymore. No sidewalks. No buildings. I'm not talking rubble or an empty field, you guys. I'm talking absolutely nothing."

"Why didn't you keep going?" someone asked him. "You know, see what was on the other side?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you – there was no other side. I tried to keep pedaling, but it was like climbing up the inside of a sphere. I could feel myself moving, I just wasn't gaining any distance."

There was a sudden firecrackerlike string of side conversations. Then a few more people came together in the center of the plaza, and the structure of the crowd tightened, and the man with the bicycle began repeating his story. The blind man had already heard enough, though, and he left.

Later that day, there was a similar report from a man who had tried to leave the district by way of the suspension bridge, and there was another a few hours after that by a woman who had taken the same route the bicyclist had. The woman said that the highway was missing now, too, and that the city dead-ended at the gray strip of concrete where the hazard lane used to be. "This was all I found," she said, and she let something trickle through her fingers – a few cigarette butts and some fragments of window glass, from the sound of it. By that evening, half a dozen people must have made the journey to the border of the monument district and back. And so began the pilgrimages.

The blind man himself walked to the border the very next morning. He took Tanganyika Street. The pavement was dry enough to clap beneath his hard-soled shoes again, and he did not have to listen so carefully for the conversations of other people and the carrying sounds of the traffic. He could hear his steps rising up off the ground, hear them echoing against the walls and the fences. That was all the guidance he needed.

He knew immediately when he had reached the margin of the city. Behind him some kids were listening to music, singing along with excited little whoops and hollers. A pretzel vendor's cart was perfuming the air, as were the thousands of blades of grass that had opened up beneath the treads of so many shoes. Before him, though, there was a total cessation of both sound and smell. It was as though a wall had risen up in front of him, but a wall with none of the usual physical properties of a wall. When he tried to touch it, he encountered no resistance whatsoever. Before he knew it, he was reaching across his own chest, his hand a full foot to the left of where it had started.

The same thing happened when he tried a second time, and again when he tried a third.

The wall was intangible but impassable.

No wonder the birds had come flooding into the air, he reflected. They had no place else to go.

He followed the same road on his way back that he had on his way out, though the walk went more quickly now that he knew the obstacles and could place his feet on the ground with more confidence. Soon he was back in his own neighborhood. He passed through the thousand dangling fingers of the willow tree that stood outside the abandoned library, and then past the upright mailbox, and then, after he had crossed the street, beneath the high rectangular buzzing of the movie theater's marquee. The theater showed only old silent movies – classics – which was why the ticket vendor always refused to provide him with a ticket, though the blind man had explained a thousand times that what he enjoyed was not the movies themselves, but the cool air and the quiet flickering of the film as it unspooled and the great sense of space above his shoulders, almost enough space for a sky to form there, he imagined, with clouds and wind currents and its own systems of weather. Or perhaps he had failed to explain it a thousand times, or explained it only in his head, or explained it to someone else altogether. It was one of the deficits of old age that he no longer remembered many of the things he would have expected himself to remember.

And then there were the things he remembered in spite of himself.

A girl was skipping rope in the courtyard across the street from him, for instance, chanting a crossbred version of a rhyme that had been popular when he was a child: "Hamburger, fish sticks, quarter pound of french fries. Icy Coke, milkshakes, on Sundays it's an apple pie."

He winced as the rope slapped the ground, involuntarily recoiling. It took him a moment to figure out why. At first he thought it might have been because of the way the sand had lashed at him while he was crossing the desert, hissing like a snake, which was itself a kind of rope, a living rope, which passed through his fingers like nylon and made only the barest rustling sound as it touched the grass. A rope was like a whip, and it was only natural for a person to wince at the sound of a whip, even a person who had never been beaten. He himself had been beaten once, though not with a whip. But that had been so long ago and he was so much older now that he found it hard to believe it could have anything to do with his reaction.

What was it then? Suddenly he knew – it was the girl who had lived at the other end of his block when he was growing up.

Mary Elizabeth was her name. He remembered listening to her as she skipped rope with her friends in the cul-de-sac that the kids in the neighborhood used as their playground. "Why are you blind?" the other kids would ask him. "Hey, why are you blind?" placing a stress on the word that made it obvious they were taunting him. He had learned that they would keep taunting him no matter how he answered, so it was better just to keep quiet.

But Mary Elizabeth had never asked him the question at all – not once.

He couldn't have been older than eight or nine at the time, but he was in love with her – in love not only with how nice she was to him, but with the sound of her voice, and the way that her sandals flapped against the underside of one of her feet but not the other as she walked, and with the smell of cocoa butter that came from her skin whenever she was jumping rope and had begun to work up a sweat.

One day – he didn't know why – he braced up his courage to tell her so. He had been drinking warm Coca-Cola out of a thermos his mother had given him, tasting the way the rusty metal flavored the soda, and was still holding the cap in his hand. As she walked by with her friends, he said her name, "Mary Elizabeth."

But before he could finish with "I love you," as he had planned to, she interrupted him. "Here you go," she said.

He felt the weight of the coin landing inside his thermos cap before he heard it.

The other kids began to laugh, but Mary Elizabeth told them to shut up. "It isn't funny, you guys. Leave the poor thing alone."

The poor thing – that was what she called him.

He might have been angry with Mary Elizabeth, or so upset that he burst into tears. He was that kind of child. He might have loved her all the more for defending him. He was that kind of child, too. But instead he had just stood there embarrassed, his courage dying out inside him as the girls took up their jump ropes and began to chant again: "Big Mac, Filet o' Fish, Quarter Pounder, french fries, icy Coke, thick shake, sundaes, and apple pies."

It was amazing to think that he had constructed an entire lifetime out of moments like this. He had strung them together like beads, he thought, choosing only the ones that were the most painful to him, the ones that left a sandpapery grit on his fingers.

So intently was he remembering the incident that he did not realize he had come to the corner where the curb dropped off into a pothole, and when he stepped off the edge, his foot caught the side. He almost fell over, but he was able to stop himself with one quickly planted step. He could tell right away that he had twisted a muscle in his knee – not badly, but enough so that he should have taken his weight off of it for an hour or two. Still, he kept walking, so that no one would stop to ask him if he needed help.

He had gone another three blocks before he realized that he had already passed the door to his building. It was almost a quarter mile behind him now, just past the silent movie theater and the library with the willow tree on the front walk. Sometimes, like everybody else, he was afraid he was losing his mind.

The small section of Clapboard Hill Road that edged up alongside the riverbank before it curved away and rose into the city was the next block to disappear. It was followed soon after by the lowermost corner of the golf course, including holes nine, eleven, twelve, and fourteen. After that it was an old mattress-spring warehouse on the opposite side of the monument district, and then the bottom half of M Street, and then, a few days later, it was the river itself. The blind man began to think of the wall as a slowly shrinking bubble that was slicing away at the city from all directions. He had no direct evidence for the idea, but he couldn't keep himself from imagining it: a giant bubble, gradually drawing together along its circumference, rising up from below as it sank down from above. He wasn't sure what would happen when it finally shrank to a single point.

Sometimes, when his curiosity got the better of him, he would go to the park to listen to what other people were saying about the phenomenon. Nobody could see anything, ever – which was to say that they could see, precisely, nothing. Some of them said that they visited the outer limits of the district regularly, every day or every few days. Some of them said that they stayed as close to the center of the city – or what remained of the city – as possible. A few of them confessed that they were frightened, but most of them simply seemed resigned to the idea of waiting to see what would happen.

He met one man who told him that he walked the entire periphery of the bubble (though he called it the circle, instead) every morning before he went to work. Every day another little piece of the city went missing, he said, and every day his walk became that much shorter. The man was a dentist, and when the blind man opened his mouth to yawn, he commented, "Those molars of yours look absolutely terrible. You should come by my office sometime and let me take a better look at them." As he left, he handed the blind man a business card with a perfectly matte surface. The card was illegible to the blind man's fingers, so he threw it away.

After a while, it seemed, somebody would always begin to compare the disappearances along the border of the city to the crossing, suggesting that the city was undergoing a crossing of its own, that it was dreaming itself out of existence, or moving from one sphere of being into another. Though the metaphor was not an obvious one, it was certainly common, which made him think that there might be some truth to it.

Soon after the subject of the crossing was mentioned, the blind man would invariably start talking about the desert again. He couldn't help himself. The experience had nearly broken him in two, and it was one of the few things he was certain he would never forget.

He was passing by the open door of a restaurant one day, after a long morning in the park, when he heard two men arguing about whether the people in the city should more properly be considered bodies or spirits. "Of course we're bodies," one of the men said. "Bodies and nothing but. Have you ever heard of a spirit that ate hamburgers and chili dogs for lunch, a spirit that got leg cramps in the middle of the night?"

The other man answered, "How can you be so sure what spirits do and don't do? Have you ever been one before?"

"I know because of the world's entire history of spirit commentary. People have been writing about spirits for thousands of years, Puckett. What do you think all that writing was about? It was about constructing the spirit, that's what – building the concept from scratch. I would say I've learned as much about the idea of the spirit as the next guy over the years, and let me tell you" – he made the hollowed-out double thumping sound that meant he was striking his chest – "this isn't it."

"But surely," the second man said, "surely if there's one thing that everybody who's ever written about the spirit agrees on, it's that when you die, your spirit is released from your body. That's got to be right at the center of the concept, doesn't it?"

"But who's to say we haven't been reembodied?"

"I'm to say it. Me. Right here."

There was a flaw at the heart of their discussion, the blind man realized. They were mistaking the spirit for the soul. Many people tended to use the words casually, interchangeably, as though there was no difference at all between them, but the spirit and the soul were not the same thing. The body was the material component of a person. The soul was the nonmaterial component. The spirit was simply the connecting line.

This was what his father, a pastor at the First Church of God in Christ, had taught him when he was a boy, and though the blind man had long since ceased to believe in God, or at least in the teachings of the First Church of God in Christ, the distinction remained meaningful to him. When you died, the connecting line of the spirit snapped, and what remained of you was simply the body on one side – a heap of clay and minerals – and the soul on the other. The spirit was nothing more than a function of their interaction, like the ripples that formed where the wind blew over the water. If you took away the wind, and you took away the water, the ripples would vanish. And if they didn't vanish? Well, if they didn't – and this was just speculation on the blind man's part – then you got what people called a ghost. A ghost was what became of a spirit when it lingered past its time. It was the ripple without the wind and the water, the connecting line separated from the body and the soul. But the blind man was not a ghost. He knew that much.

He thought about approaching the table where the two men were discussing the issue and interrupting them with, "Gentlemen, I may be a body, and I may be a soul, but I'm certainly no spirit." Their conversation had already moved on, though, and they were arguing about something else now.

He heard a chair scraping across the floor, someone grinding pepper with a pepper mill, a woman laughing and slapping her table with an open palm.

Somewhere a bell was ringing.

Fat sizzled on a grill.

The birds sounded closer than ever.

The blind man turned his attention back to the street and walked on. That night he fell asleep sitting on a tall stool beside his kitchen counter. When he woke up the next morning and felt the cool layer of Formica under his forehead and the still air around his shoulders, it took him a moment to remember where he was. Instinctively he reached out for his leather satchel, the one in which he had carried his keys and his extra shoes and identification papers for so many years when he was alive. But of course it wasn't there. It was one of the many things he had lost in the desert, along with his eyeglasses and the better part of his wits. Most of the time he barely missed them.

The wind was not blowing, but something must have shaken the tree outside his window, because he could hear the budded end of a dogwood twig tapping delicately against the glass. It had the soft, clear, cadenced sound of a walking cane striking the ground, and he thought of the last time he himself had used such a cane, an entire lifetime of years ago. It was shortly after the day Mary Elizabeth dropped the coin into his thermos cap, when he was eight or nine years old. His school bus had just dropped him off at the corner of the block when he heard a few of the older boys in his neighborhood approaching him from across the crisped grass of someone's lawn. "Why are you blind?" they asked him. "Hey, you, why are you blind?"

He never knew quite what to say to this question. It seemed obvious that the boys were teasing him again, but there was always the chance that they were genuinely curious, that they honestly wanted to know for once, and he hated to imagine himself hurting their feelings. Why would they keep asking him if they didn't really care? he wondered. They wouldn't, would they? What would be the point?

He decided to try answering them. "My mama says it happened right after I was born. I was an incubator baby, and they gave me too much oxygen."

This made the boys laugh for some reason, and so he guessed that they had not been curious, after all. They repeated the word "incubator": "Incubator. He says he's an incubator. Even as a baby, dude was an incubator – man, that's sick."

Then they fell quiet, and one of the boys asked him, "So how often do you incubate? Once a day? What about in the shower? Do you incubate in the shower?"

He was confused. "Just that one time," he said. This set off a second round of laughter and jostling. Soon the boys were jostling him, as well, and though he wasn't sure, he thought that they might be coaxing him to join in with the fun – to laugh along with the joke, whatever it was. He gave a tiny experimental chuckle, but it didn't sound right. It was raspy and low, much deeper than his normal laugh.

All of a sudden he needed to swallow. He allowed the boys' voices to die out before he told them, "Well, I need to get home now."

One of them stepped in front of him. "Hey, that's a great cane you've got there. Can I see that cane?" "I don't think so."

"Aw, man." A shoe scuffed at the asphalt. "Little dude burned me. That's no way to treat a buddy."

Another boy said, "Yeah. Come on, kid. Let him see the cane. He'll give it right back."

"That's right. All I want to do is take a look at it."

And the last boy said, "You don't want us to think you don't like us, do you?"

He didn't believe them at first – why would he? – but then something in his conscience gave itself over to the possibility that they might be telling the truth, as it always did, no matter how often they deceived him, and he knew that he was going to give them the cane. There was a little man who lived inside him, gripping his heart and repeating, Believe everybody. Never hurt a soul. Believe everybody. Never hurt a soul, and though sometimes he tried to shut his ears to the man, in the end he could never help but listen to him. "Do you promise you'll give it right back?" he asked the boys.

"Cross my heart, hope to die."

"Well, okay, then."

As soon as he held the cane out, one of them yanked it out of his grip. "I like this cane," he said, and another whistled, "Man, that cane makes you look badass" and the third said, "A cane fit for a pimp," to which the first one answered, "I know. I think I just might have to keep this cane for myself," and he listened to them praising the cane and passing it back and forth for what seemed like forever, until its absence in his hands began to itch at him.

"Okay. Give it back now," he said. "I need to go home." "Hold your horses." "What's your hurry?"

"Yeah, who said it was your cane anyway?"

"You guys – " He complained. But they rapped him once over the head with the cane, then a second time across the butt, and when he fell down, they took off running. He heard one of them say, "Clon-n-n-ng!," making his voice vibrate the way the cane had as it struck his skull. Then a door slammed a few houses down the block from him and they were gone.

That was the last he saw of his cane. He had never gotten another one.

When he heard the same boys talking in the cul-de-sac a few days later, they insisted that they had never met him before, and he couldn't seem to convince them otherwise. "Cane?" they said. "I don't know anything about a cane. Maybe you mean 'stain.' Did somebody take your stain? All that incubation will give a man stains. You know what I think? I think you're just making up stories to impress the chickadees."

It didn't take long for him to give up on the idea of getting the cane back from them. Over the next few weeks he learned to walk by the sound of his footsteps, by an outstretched hand and a small measure of intuition. He stored the shape of his own neighborhood in his head, gradually unfolding it like a map at the boundaries. He avoided the older boys whenever he could until, eventually, they grew up, got jobs and got married, or just exhausted themselves and forgot what it had been like when they were children.

This was what he remembered as he sat in his kitchen listening to the dogwood tree tapping against his window.

But why did he remember only the things in his life that had hurt him? Why couldn't he remember the things that had given him joy or caused him to smile: the jokes he had heard, the songs that had made him lift his arms in the air, the people who had loved him, whose cheeks he had touched with his fingers?

There had been a time, and not that long ago, when he had taken pride in the fineness of his memory. He had thought of the history of his life as a perfect unfraying string, spooling out in a single line behind him; all he had to do was take it in his hands, give it a few strong hitches, and he could reexamine it at any point. But now the string had become tangled and knotted, and he was afraid that it would never be straight again.

It was late that afternoon when he heard someone say that the rest of the golf course had disappeared, along with the fire station, the arboretum, and the back half of one of the office buildings on Erendira Street. The next morning it was the natural science museum and most of the shopping plaza. And a couple of days after that, for the first time, a woman reported that the phenomenon had extended its great blank barriers below the ground. The woman said that she had been crossing through the subway tunnel that ran beneath Christopher Street when she paused at the edge of the platform to tie her shoes. She noticed that the tracks and the track bed were no longer there. She backed away, then peered over the edge to look again. Nothing. She found the crushed red and silver disk of a Coke can on the platform and tried to drop it into the empty space. But she must have miscalculated, she said, because it landed at her feet, bounced a few times, then rolled away behind her. "It was like there was a river running between this side of the platform and the other. Except that there was nothing to it. No clay, no water – so basically no river." She gave a muffled laugh. "I guess I don't really know how to describe it."

"You don't have to describe it," someone said. "We've all seen it for ourselves."

But the blind man had not seen it. "You're talking about what's happening down below," he said. "That's one thing. But what about what's happening up above?"

He heard a half dozen collars rustling as the people around him craned their heads to look into the sky. "It's hard to tell," someone answered. "But something's definitely going on up there."

There was an unusual shearing pattern to the tops of the clouds, apparently, but no one could say whether it was the effect of the bubble or just some strange wind blowing high in the atmosphere. The blind man listened as they talked the matter over. Was the top corner of one of the high-rises missing? Had the sky always been that same powdery shade of blue? Finally, a gravelly voice summed things up for him: "It looks a little washed out, maybe, but everything's still up there, at least as far as I can tell."

After that, the crowd began to dissipate. As the blind man was leaving, a finger tapped his shoulder. He smelled a faint whiff of lavender. "How are you doing?" The voice belonged to a woman.

"I've seen worse times," the blind man said.

"You don't remember me, do you?"

"I don't. I'm sorry."

"I'm Minny Rings. I met you after the evacuation. We made coffee and English muffins together." "Did we?"

"Mm-hmm. You and me and Luka Sims. And this makes six to ten."

Luka Sims? The blind man thought about the name for a moment, and then he remembered. "The newspaperman." "That's right."

What he remembered about the newspaperman was the quality of his breathing, which had been quick and nervous, reminding him of the pulsing heart of a rabbit he had once held in his lap. Also, there was the astringent smell of ink that rose from his clothing and his irritating habit of trying to take the blind man's arm whenever it came time for them to cross the street. Nothing else came to him.

Still, he knew that he had liked the newspaperman, though he could not have explained why. "My regards to you both," he said to the woman.

How long had he been standing there rooting through the tag ends of his memories? It seemed like only a few seconds, but he wasn't sure. He waited for the woman to answer him, and when she didn't say anything, he presumed that the conversation was over. He walked home by way of Park Street and M.

When he got back to his apartment, he opened the window and turned his ears to the sound of a flock of birds that were roosting in a nearby tree. The birds whistled and cooed to each other, efficient little one- and two-note songs, until a car with a broken radiator passed beneath them and they gave a chorus of fluttery peeping sounds. A couple of kids dashed by, smacking the tree with their palms, and the birds took to the air with a sudden explosive snap of their wings. How wonderful it must have been, he thought – to run with a body meant for running, to see with eyes meant for seeing, to fly with wings meant for flying. Sometimes he thought that the most joyful sound in the world would be the sound of the birds taking over the city after everyone else was gone.

It was midway through the next day when the blind man's own building disappeared. He was standing in the colonnade when a man who had spent the last few hours circling the edge of the city stopped to give some of the people around him a report. Another few blocks were gone, he said, and when he listed them off, the blind man recognized the name of his own.

His building had still been there when he left his front door that morning. He was sure of that. How closely behind him had it been extinguished? he wondered.

A group of rollerbladers went skating by. Someone dropped a rubber ball.

There was nothing in his home that he truly needed. He could always find someplace else to sleep the night. But it was disquieting to know that for the moment, at least, he had nowhere else to go.

"Where's your cane, little man?" his mother had asked him the day the boys on his block took it away from him. And he had answered her, "I don't need it anymore."

For a long time it had seemed to him that there were more people on the streets, more people in the park, than ever before, but it was only now that he understood why. As the city became smaller, they were all being drawn toward the center. They were like pieces of bark and foam caught in a giant whirlpool.

And at last he apprehended what was happening.

When the walls came together and the bubble finally collapsed, this was where they would all end up: right here, between these benches and rustling trees. It would happen in a matter of days or weeks. There would be no way for them to avoid it. They would gather together in the clearing around the monument, however many thousand of them there were, and they would stand there shoulder to shoulder. They would listen to each other's voices, and they would breathe each other's breath. And they would wait for that power that would pull them like a chain into whatever came next, into that distant world where broken souls are wrenched out of their histories.