The Brief History of the Dead

TWO. THE SHELTER

The wind had been blowing for twenty-three days, first from the east and then from the south, making a prolonged death moan inside the vents. Occasionally a gust of ice would push its way through the hut's system of turns and baffles, and hundreds of clear gray crystals would come fanning out over the room, peppering down onto the desk and the floor. Laura would stop whatever she was doing and watch them melt. She was disheartened by how long it took. The heating panels were obviously breaking down, if not crippled beyond repair. Next the lights would go, and after that, if she was still alive, it would be the food stores. What a total damned disaster.

The trouble had started nearly a month ago, when the antenna had snapped off the communications array. She and Puckett and Joyce had reconstructed the event as best they could. The antenna was a slender aluminum stilt sheltered inside a large satellite dish, and a thick casing of snow and ice had collected around it. The wind had driven the temperature above freezing for a day or two – the same freak wind that was slowly melting the ice shelf out from under them – and the mass of snow and ice had slipped from the bowl of the array in one giant chunk, taking the antenna along with it.

That was it. That was all that had happened. The whole thing was unbelievably stupid.

Why hadn't the dish been constructed out of thermogenic metal? Or, failing that, why hadn't someone positioned it so that it would remain empty? Or, at the very least, why hadn't the three of them been provided with the equipment they might need to repair it? Sometimes it seemed to Laura that the entire expedition had been slapped together by monkeys. But no. It had been planned and financed entirely by the Coca-Cola Corporation, as either a publicity exercise or a research expedition, depending on where you read about it: an internal document or a news release.

The idea was to send a team of people to the Antarctic to explore methods of converting polar ice for use in the manufacture of soft drinks. The ice cap was already melting, after all, pouring into the ocean by the tankerload, and the corporation might as well take advantage of it while they still could. That was their reasoning. The advertising department had even devised a new slogan: "Coca-Cola – made from the freshest water on the planet," which, if it caught on, they planned to modify in a year or two to "Coca-Cola – now that's fresh!"

The expedition was supposed to last for six months. The planning board had appointed Michael Puckett the polar specialist, Robert Joyce the soft drink specialist, and her, Laura, the wildlife specialist. There was some debate as to whether they should call her a "wildlife" specialist or an "animal life" specialist – was Antarctica wild in the same way that, say, the Amazon of the last century was wild? – but the argument was quelled when someone suggested that the board consider the word "wild" in its original sense, as a neglected or uncultivated region. So it was that the photograph of Laura that appeared in all the newspapers, the embarrassing one that depicted her stuffing underwear into a military-style canvas bag, bore a caption that read, "Laura Byrd, wildlife specialist, prepares for the long winter." Her first lover had been a journalism professor, and she was well aware of the subtle ways that newspaper editors contrived to mock the stories they found absurd. Even now, with the cold gradually folding itself around the hut like a pair of hands, she could feel the color rising to her cheeks as she thought about it. Photographs. Wildlife. Monkeys.

Wasn't there an old television commercial that showed a family of monkeys sharing a bottle of Coca-Cola at Christmas? She was pretty sure she remembered seeing something like that when she was a little girl.

In any case, it was not long after the antenna splintered free of the satellite dish – two days, to be exact – that the radio gave a few last sputters of white noise and chopped-up syllables and then went silent. Why couldn't she stop rehearsing the details? The web and telephone connections fell dead along with the transceiver, so that the three of them – she, Puckett, and Joyce – had no way of contacting the corporation for help. Puckett insisted that they search the shelter for any spare parts they could use to patch the radio or the transceiver back together. There were only two rooms to go through, a living area and a sleeping area; nevertheless, the operation took them half the day. They uncovered several hundred bags of pemmican and jerky, a jar of ten thousand vitamin C tablets, a bundle of electric blankets tied together with elastic cords, two kerosene lanterns, six cans of freeze-dried coffee, a Primus stove, an extra pair of collapsible tents, and even a rudimentary tool chest, but nothing that would help them fix the radio or the broken antenna.

The equipment register was plain. Laura knew they wouldn't find anything else.

The fact was that if even one of their communications systems had been working, they could have requested the material they needed to repair any of the others. But with each and every one of them broken, they were flat out of safeguards.

The people at Coca-Cola knew everything there was to know about advertising and market research and product positioning, but not quite enough, as it turned out, about polar exploration.

The three of them waited almost a week for the corporation to reestablish contact with them. Puckett kept digging out his ice cores, and Joyce kept testing the water to see if it met the company's purity specifications, and Laura kept searching the area for even the slightest sign of wildlife. She couldn't help but think that the work they were doing was a waste of time, that the corporation already knew everything they cared to know about the continent from their dozens upon dozens of feasibility studies. After all, if the expedition had been a serious scientific endeavor and not just a way of drumming up interest in Coca-Cola's newest product line, wouldn't the powers that be have sent more than three people along? Wouldn't they have conducted a more rigorous training program? No, the expedition was a publicity stunt – nothing more than that – and they all knew it. Still, the three of them kept working. It was the best way they could think of to kill the time as they waited for help to arrive. These weren't the days of Shackleton and Scott, after all, when you could disappear into the polar waste for years at a time before anyone noticed you were missing. Expedition protocol required that they submit a statement of progress to the corporation every twenty-four hours, by three in the afternoon Pacific Standard Time, and until the radio went dead they had never missed a day. Of course, three in the morning and three in the afternoon could be indistinguishable so far south, where the sun might float in the sky for months at a time, and it was possible that they had mistaken the one for the other from time to time. But there was every difference in the world between missing a deadline by a few hours and missing it by four, five, six, seven days. The corporation must have realized something was wrong by now.

Soon enough, someone would cut through the wind and the snow to rescue them. Laura could picture it even with her eyes open. A sledge would come slicing across the ice, a team of riders would climb out, and the supplies they needed would be dropped at their front door. Or a helicopter would chop down from overhead, unload a new transceiver, and screw itself back into the air, leaning forward in the wind like a dragonfly.

In the meantime, she could just sit playing cards with Puckett and Joyce. They stared at the reinforced arches along the inside of the hut. Every so often, one of them would press a palm against the door to feel the cold seeping through the metal. They had plenty of time. The three of them began to hear voices calling out to them, dogs barking, the digging noise of engines – sounds that were couched inside the wind like plants flexed inside a seed. Eventually, though, they realized they were just imagining things. No one was coming for them. They had been forgotten.

Laura was the last of them to reach this understanding. When she did, she became so dizzy that she saw spots of light in her eyes – thousands of them, exploding like distant stars. She thought she was going to faint. She muttered something about being out of luck, to which Puckett insisted that you could never really claim to be out of luck, since you never knew when things would get worse – or better, for that matter. Luck was not a limited resource, and there was no sense in trying to measure it. To which Joyce responded that the world was full of stories about people who ran out of luck: look at Prometheus, chained to his rock, with that eagle wresting out his liver for the rest of time. There was a person whose luck had been exhausted. To which Puckett suggested that maybe luck wasn't the sort of thing people could be said to possess at all: maybe there were currents of luck, good and bad, that ran through the world, and sometimes we found ourselves in one current, sometimes in the other, but the water itself was never truly a part of us, we were just trying to stay afloat in it. To which Joyce said, "If you've never felt luck inside you – really inside you, Puckett – then you have no credibility on this matter."

Laura had been exasperated by the conversation at the time. It was the sort of spiritless debate that the men would toss back and forth for hours on end just to keep themselves entertained. She had threatened more than once to walk to her death in the snow if they didn't stop. Now, though, she would have given anything to hear their voices again. Or any voice, for that matter.

Puckett and Joyce had been gone for nearly three weeks. When it became obvious that the corporation was not going to send any assistance, they had set out with a loaded sledge toward the western rim of the Ross Sea, where a station studying the migratory habits of emperor penguins was supposed to be located. Their plan was to contact Coca-Cola, explain what had happened, and then, if they could, borrow a radio and a spare transceiver before heading back to the shelter. The sledge ran on the latest fuel cells, designed to operate for sixty days on a single charge. Even if the ice had gone soft or the ridges were lined out against them, it shouldn't have taken them longer than a week to reach the station. They ought to have returned a few days later. Laura was beginning to resign herself to the idea that they weren't coming back. She was alone in the hut, and she was frightened.

Outside, the wind made a ringing noise between the cables. The tone shifted and pulsed in slow bands of sound that faded to silence at the upper end of her hearing register. It reminded her of the bells that used to ring at the summer camp she went to as a girl. There were two of them, at opposite ends of the camp, and she had discovered a place by the docks no bigger than her own body where the sounds would cancel each other out. She would stand there listening to the crickets and the lapping of the water inside a bulging pocket of silence. She walked back and forth in the confined space of the hut trying to locate such a pocket. In the corner above the computer station, maybe, or in the chink of space underneath the bed. Then she gave up and sat in her chair by the door and poured herself a glass of wine. It was a '27 Merlot, their only bottle. It tasted wonderful.

Polar bears. In the Coca-Cola commercial. It was polar bears, not monkeys.

Four days later, she found a digital music player inside Joyce's footlocker. She was washing her face on the other side of the room when the lock sprang open with the abruptness of a gunshot, and she couldn't resist looking inside. Joyce had taken his journal, his toiletries, and most of his clothing with him, but he had left behind a stack of carefully folded long Johns and a pocket-sized Bertelsmann player with a selection of several hundred tracks on it. Laura set the dial to shuffle, and for the next three weeks, until the day she ventured out of the hut into a hard, clear evening of windless snow, the shelter resounded with the music of Beethoven and Link Springs, Handel and Schoenberg and Charlie Parker.

She settled into a routine of reading, exercising, and cooking, marked by long periods of sitting quietly in a chair with the music wrapping itself around her like a cloak. For one hour after lunch every day, she tried to add a page or two to her journal analyzing the effect that the corporation's cola production methods would have on the continent's indigenous plant and wildlife – her only official duty of the expedition. The task was made more arduous, and more absurd, by the almost total absence of indigenous plant and wildlife in the area. All the seals and penguins were concentrated along the rim of the ice shelf, where holes and fissures gave them easy access to the ocean. And the only vegetable life on the continent was in the ocean itself, where various forms of algae and seaweed lived. Occasionally she fiddled with the radio, hoping to summon up a signal she could navigate back to the corporation. Once, for less than a minute, she heard a dolphinlike series of clicks, squeaks, and whistles, but then the receiver went dead again, and she couldn't make out another sound. She played solitaire every so often, but she always stopped when she realized she had been shuffling the cards for too long without laying out a hand. Sometimes she paced back and forth between the bed and the door, counting off her steps. Four, five, six, seven. She tried to sleep for eight hours a night, but because of the slow deterioration of the heating panels, she often woke after just three or four, the muscles in her calves bunching painfully together in the cold. She made a point of checking the thermometer every morning. The temperature inside the hut was dropping by about two degrees a night. Soon it would be below the freezing mark, and she would have to punch through a lid of ice just to get to the water in the drinking basin. Already, she could see her breath making tiny little vanishing blemishes in the air. How cold would it have to become before she began to develop frostbite?

One night, shortly after she had eaten dinner, when she could have sworn there wasn't a thought in her head, she became terribly sad. She felt it as a sort of aching in her joints, as though her body were suddenly collapsing in on itself. What was this? she wondered. The feeling seemed to rise up from out of nowhere. First she was just standing by the broken transceiver, listening to a Shostakovich recording and absentmindedly conducting the orchestra with her finger, and then she was sitting on the edge of her bed, shaking and weeping uncontrollably. She cried until her stomach made a fist inside her, and then she doubled over and placed her head between her legs, gasping until she was able to pick up the rhythm of her breathing again. Every night after that, at exactly the same time, it happened again – the wild sobbing and then the clutching feeling in her gut that made her forget everything that had ever happened to her.

She was starved for conversation and laughter, for the simple tangency of other bodies. She tried to remember the times she had spoken to other people – people who had taken her knee and leaned in to whisper in her ear, people who had shouted her down in classrooms and committee meetings – and when she couldn't remember them, she imagined them, which was the next best thing. She missed Puckett and Joyce, their ridiculous arguments, even the sound of their breathing. She suspected more and more that they had gotten lost somewhere between the hut and the Ross Sea station, or that they had made it to the station but decided not to risk the return trip. She missed her mother and father, too, and her friends, and her neighbors from the apartment building where she used to live. Sometimes she thought about them so much her head became filled with their voices.

"Come on, sweetie, time for bed," she heard her father saying, and then it was fifteen years later, and her college roommate was telling her, "I'm staying with Kyle for the weekend, so you've got the room all to yourself." Next it was ten years after that, and she listened to her boss as he rapped on the door of her office and said, "I'm going to give you one word, and you tell me what you think: Antarctica." And a year before that, her boyfriend had told her, "That's the lipstick. You should wear that color from now on. God, it makes me want to bite your lips off." And then, just a week before she left for the Pole with Puckett and Joyce: "What, you can't spare a lousy dollar? Miss New-Black-Shoes-with-Her-Fancy-Matching-Belt. Miss Too-Busy-to-Give-a-Damn-About-Anyone-but-Herself." This was the man who begged for change outside the Coca-Cola building.

She would listen to their voices until the wind drowned them out, and then she would emerge from the fine open air of her memories into the low gray arches of the hut and the endless hours of sitting and pacing.

She looked for ways to draw out her routine, teasing it apart into its various threads and following each one to the end, no matter how wispy and frail it became. She wasn't going to allow herself to go crazy, she decided. She exercised for a full hour in the morning, rather than just fifteen minutes, jogging in place in her coat and gloves. She read books that forced her to pay attention to every word. The meals she cooked became more and more laborious: pot roasts, stews, and casseroles that used up her store of vegetables and needed to simmer for half the afternoon. She pounced at every interruption, suspending whatever she was doing in order to tug out a crease in her blanket or sweep a trace of snow up from the floor. But nothing seemed to help. The truth was that no matter how many times she lifted herself out of her chair, trying to simulate a feeling of urgency, she was never truly going anywhere. She was stuck right where she was, and she knew it.

She was making a minor repair to the stove one morning when she nearly chopped off her left hand. It happened like this: She heard a bolt rattling above the burner, and when she couldn't get the leverage she needed to tighten it, she climbed on top of the stove, trying for a different angle. She could see straight down the crevice in back. A metal tailing of some kind had come loose from the wall. It was trembling and jerking, brushing against the stove as the wind shook the cabin. That was where the noise was coming from; it wasn't the bolt at all. She knew the noise would drive her crazy if she let it continue, and so she tried to twist the tailing back into place with her fingers. When that didn't work, she tried to saw it off with her pocket knife. And when that didn't work, she decided to hack it loose with a hatchet she found in the tool chest. She steadied herself against the stove with her left hand, brought the hatchet up with her right, and just before she reversed her swing, she lost her grip.

Her hand was so numb from the cold that she didn't even realize it was empty until the ax came tilting past her head and crashed into the top of the stove. It made a bell-like rolling noise and then clattered to the floor.

When she looked down, she saw a silvery gash in the stove, curling down into itself like a coring of frozen soil. The gash was right at the tip of her fingers – she might have been pointing to it.

That was the moment when she realized how truly alone she was. If the hatchet had fallen just an inch or two to the left, she would have bled to death before anyone found her – weeks or, she was prepared to imagine, even years later. She would have to be more careful from now on.

She began to remember certain incidents from her life – meetings, conversations, and various other episodes – with a clarity that amazed her. Once, when she was in college, she had spent an entire day at the Chicago zoo watching a baby giraffe, the last the world would see, swirling and jiggling a length of iron chain with its long black tongue. On the day she began her first job, working behind the counter of a dry cleaner's, a customer had given her a pair of pants with a ring-shaped stain on the crotch and asked, "Can you get Formula 44-D out of polyester-rayon?" Then there was the time her mother took her to the birthday party of a school friend and afterward scolded her for singing the phrase "When are we going home?" over and over again, to the tune of the "Happy Birthday" song. Laura had been only four years old at the time.

She wondered if she was undergoing the same rush of memories that the dying are said to experience – only much, much more slowly.

Laura Byrd, wildlife specialist, prepares for the long winter.

And then there was the crying again, which always came as a complete surprise. She couldn't understand why she wasn't able to anticipate it. Maybe it was like the pain that women underwent in childbirth, those million agonies of cramping and stretching that washed the mind clean as they took place. Or maybe it had something to do with the upwelling of memories that seemed to place her so firmly in her past life, a life that had overtaken and caught hold of her just as her present was becoming more and more indistinct and her future was fading to the merest suggestion. Maybe the crying was part of her other life, her real life, the one that was unfolding before her eyes, and maybe she was nothing more than a visitor there.

One day, not long before the thermometer stopped working, she realized that the hum she was so accustomed to hearing from the shelter had gone silent. This was the sound the hut made as it converted the vibrations of its atoms into heat. It emanated from deep inside the walls, a tone so uniform and regular that she barely recognized it as a sound at all. She wouldn't even have noticed it was missing if it hadn't been for a brief lapse in the wind that brought a nearly perfect stillness to the air. She took off her glove and touched her fingers to one of the heating panels. She could feel the cold biting through her skin. When she lifted the frame from around the panel and slid the locking plate loose, she saw that the coil inside had faded to a pale, lusterless gray. She looked behind the other panels and found exactly the same thing: dozens of dimmed-out heating coils, like dead worms washed onto the sidewalk after a rain. She had known all along that it would happen, and it had. The heating panels had finally quit working.

There were two tents left in the storage closet (Puckett and Joyce had taken the others), and she set one of them up in the center of the living room so that she could sleep inside it. It was surprisingly well insulated – with its own limited heating system, one of the new so-called "soft coils" – and before long she was spending most of her day in there. The light that filtered through the fabric gave the air a milky pink coloring, and the dome inhaled and exhaled slightly as the air pressure shifted in the hut. She had the absurd impression – a dream, really – that she was living inside a jellyfish. Early in the morning, before she was wholly awake, she would lie in her sleeping bag listening to the watery lurching of the wind and imagine that she was pumping slowly across the floor of the ocean as millions of yellow diatoms sailed around her. Dreaming was easier than screaming, and screaming was easier than worrying, and worrying was easier than crying, which was what she knew she would be reduced to if she didn't keep a hard eye on herself.

She left the tent each morning to make breakfast and to exercise, and every so often to use the bathroom, and then again in the evening to cook dinner. The shelter retained only a small amount of the heat it had stored over the past six months, and the stove warmed it up a little bit more, but she still had to put on her coat and gloves every time she climbed outside the tent. She didn't yet know what she would do when the electricity finally gave out completely. It had flickered off a few days before, coming back on in a series of arrested spurts. She had counted every second between the bursts of light and darkness, feeling sick in the pit of her stomach. But for now, at least, it was still flowing.

Flowing. Blowing. Snowing.

She often found herself spinning out word associations as she lay drowsing in the tent. It was a game she had begun playing as long ago as elementary school, as she tried to run a knife through the empty minutes between recess and the end of the school day.

Snowing. Snowball. Ball game. Ball bearing. Bering Strait. Straight man. Man about town.

Man about town. Laura had been working for the Coca-Cola Corporation for less than a month when they instituted what they called their "man about town" campaign. This was during the last big water-safety scare, when all the talk shows and newspapers were full of reports that the terrorists were planning to poison the nation's drinking water. The corporation hired some ten thousand good-looking men and women to dine in the restaurants of New York, Los Angeles, and a handful of other large cities and say to anyone they spotted ordering a glass of water, "Wouldn't you feel safer drinking a Coke?" By the third week of the operation, domestic sales had increased by forty percent, and by the fifth week they had increased another twenty. The campaign was Joyce's idea, and its success had landed him the promotion that would eventually send him to Antarctica – and, Laura speculated, to the bottom of a crevasse somewhere. Puckett had been chosen because of his knowledge of the polar landscape (though in truth he was no more than a hobbyist) and Laura because, of the dozen or so environmental impact specialists in her department, she was the only one who had seniority enough to be eligible for the trip but too little seniority to decline. This was how such things were usually decided.

Four days after the electricity began to falter, it snapped off with a conspicuousness that she knew was final. A scent of cordite spread through the shelter – though it couldn't possibly have been cordite – and the Bertelsmann player stopped dead in the middle of an Etta James song. If she had understood anything at all about how the generator worked, she might have been able to repair it, but she knew next to nothing about electro-mechanics, only the few scraps of theory she remembered from her freshman year of college. She turned on the flashlight she had placed in the pocket of the tent. The air around her still had the same slightly pink quality to it, but now that the light was reflected back in on itself, rather than filtered through from outside, it was twice as sharp as it had been before. Everything inside the tent seemed to shine with a finely edged clarity. There was a box of granola bars in the recess by the tent's entrance. She unwrapped and ate one. She was astonished by the distinctness of the individual grains, which were cemented together with such cohesion that they resembled tiny puzzle pieces. This was the kind of food she would be eating from now on, she knew: hunks of pemmican, dehydrated biscuits, beef jerky, and granola bars – food that was meant to last through an apocalypse. She could always hook up the Primus stove or try to construct a fire, of course, but even then she expected the provisions to run out in less than a month. The expedition was supposed to have ended weeks ago, and their reserve of supplies had always been meager.

So this was her situation: no heat, no electricity, and soon there would be no food.

She knew what she had to do – knew, in fact, so immediately that she realized she must have been pondering the question for weeks.

Her only chance was to outfit the second sledge, abandon the shelter, and set off after Puckett and Joyce. If she made it to the western rim of the Ross Sea, she would find food, shelter, and companionship; if not, she would be no worse off than she already was. She didn't want to leave. The thought of venturing out across the ice, into all that cold and emptiness, terrified her. But there was no other choice.

She spent the next half-day gathering the supplies she needed: boxes of condensed and dehydrated food, a jar of multivitamins, a few cans of coffee, a dozen rolls of toilet paper, one change of clothing, her tent and sleeping bag and thermal lining, her first-aid kit, a bottle of sunblock, a coil of Alpine rope, several waterproof boxes of matches, the Primus stove and a few cans of heating oil, a bundle of candles, the spare tent, a small magnetic compass (the sledge was equipped with a GPS monitor, but she didn't want to take any chances), her flashlight and a box of extra batteries, the tool box, a cooking pot, a second cooking pot for melting ice into water, a few pieces of plywood, an ice ax, a pick, a sledging shovel, her pocket knife, and, finally, a harness and a pair of skis and ski poles, in case the sledge broke down and she had to haul the supplies across the ice herself. She used up more than an hour looking for an extra fuel cell for the sledge, but she wasn't able to find one. Which meant that either the corporation hadn't thought to provide them with one or that Puckett and Joyce had taken it with them. In either case, she would have to make do without it.

She was concentrating so hard on culling and sorting the equipment that she didn't even notice that the wind had stopped blowing until she swung the door of the hut open to a paling sky and a motionless field of snow. She stepped outside, tucking her hands in her armpits. The air was absolutely still. No matter where she looked she couldn't see a single cloud, though from somewhere a sparse, floury snow was falling.

It was one of the sunset days – that was how she had come to think of them – when the sky fills for hours at a time with trailers of pink and gold. A bare freckling of stars was just beginning to show through the atmosphere, and she began to count them. The longer she stared, though, the more she was able to see, and soon she gave up.

She squatted down to examine the condition of the ice. Thousands of parallel ridges – sastrugi, they were called – stretched from the door of the hut all the way to the horizon, combed into the snow by the southern wind. But the ice was not too soft, nor was it too hard and dry, and she thought that it would make for good traveling.

She began to chip away at the mass of ice covering the sledge, setting the sharp end of the pick against it and hammering down with her palm. It was like breaking the stone from around a sculpture, and as the shards rained down around her feet by the thousands, she contemplated the distance that lay ahead of her, and the industry, and the luck, it would take to cross it.