The Brief History of the Dead

THREE. THE ENCOUNTER

It was hot in the office, a terrible, parching heat that lifted the smell of ink from the mimeograph machine and filled the air with it. For a long time Luka sat at his desk fanning the fumes away from his face. Then he opened the window and pulled the vines out of the way, waiting for the breeze to come blowing through. The quiet outside was nearly transcendent. There were no cars idling at the stoplight, no children running past with balloons. There was nobody down there at all. The air tasted like granite and river grass. He took a few deep breaths and returned to his stencil.

He was working on the latest edition of the Sims Sheet. The headline read ALONE IN THE CITY, and the subheading, in a slightly smaller type, EDITOR WONDERS, IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE? That was as far as he had gotten.

He had spent the better part of the morning stationed outside the River Road Coffee Shop with a full stack of the early edition in his hands. From seven to eleven-thirty he had stood there, completely alone, reading the headline to himself: THE GREAT LEAVE-TAKING CONTINUES. Four and a half hours of waiting by the plate-glass window where dozens of bodies used to sit shifting about on rickety wooden stools, inching their coffees to the left as the sun came slowly into view. Four and a half hours of counting the birds on the ledges and the bits of trash blowing by on the street. Four and a half hours, and he saw not a single human soul, not even the people he considered his regulars, like the woman who wore the white beret, or the thin man in the wrinkled business suit, or the dessert chef who always poked his head outside just as Luka was packing up to leave.

In all his years in the city, this was the first time such a thing had happened. Who or what had taken everybody he didn't know. But that wasn't the question that was bothering him. The question that was bothering him was, Why hadn't it taken him as well? He allowed himself a few extra minutes to wait out any stragglers before he finally gave up and walked home. On his way, he dumped the entire run of newspapers in a garbage basket, then thought better of it and fished them back out, then thought better of it again and threw them away, but he kept a single copy, a memento, which he pinned to the wall behind his desk. It would serve as a memorial for something – the day his hope died out, maybe.

Why was he still working on the newspaper at all? He wasn't sure. Habit, he supposed – something to keep his hands busy, something to keep his mind occupied. He could already sense where the whole thing was heading, though: down, down, down, into the deepest, most embarrassing form of solipsism.

He wasn't looking forward to it. He had always been the paper's only writer, and now he was its only reader, too. Soon, if he wasn't careful, he would be issuing reports on his own bowel movements.

The L. Sims News & Speculation Sheet: All the Sims That's Fit to Print.

Or, better yet: All the Sims That's Sims to Sims.

A tiny licking breeze came into the office and stirred the air. He heard the vines that had fallen back over the window rustling against the brick. He bent over his desk to tinker with his lead: "At approximately 11:30 this morning, the editor of this newspaper concluded that he was the last human being in the city. And perhaps, aside from the birds, the last creature of any kind." Or should he use a comma before the "and"? Or a dash? Or a parenthesis? When he was in his early thirties, five or six years before he died, he had taught an Introduction to Journalism course at Columbia University and been astonished to discover how many of his students – some of the best students in the city, mind you – were incapable of writing a good opening sentence. Not only did they bury their leads, they burned them, dismembered them, and then buried them. This had been one of his favorite classroom jokes, though it had never gotten so much as a single laugh. No wonder. He stuck the course out for three semesters – three semesters, two hundred students, and one love affair, to be exact – before he decided to resume writing full-time. He hated to say that reporting was in his blood, but it did seem to offer him something that nothing else did: the exhilaration of a million small facts. When he was working on a story, he felt as though he were a paleontologist uncovering a set of bones, chipping away at the world until he had enucleated some small, hard object he could catalogue and carry away in his hands: a skull, say, or a breastbone. That was the real reason he kept on writing the newspaper: he didn't know how else to behave.

He was a fool, of course, and he knew it. He had traded the pleasures of conversation and friendship, pleasures available to anybody who so much as stepped out his front door, for a million hours of sitting alone in his office piecing together the next day's copy. He had taken it for granted that the community of the dead, and earlier the community of the living, would always be there, waiting just outside, and so he had neglected it, choosing to watch and listen from the periphery rather than actually participate in it. He ought to have set his notebook down, gone to one of the bars, and sought out a few drinking buddies. He ought to have fallen in love with somebody, or at least tried.

There were so many things he ought to have done, but he hadn't, and now it was too late.

He decided to add the comma to the "and," and then he moved on to the next sentence, and before long he had lost himself in the story he was telling.

He must have been working for half an hour before something finally snatched his attention. He lifted his head.

For just a moment he was sure that he had heard a tapping noise. He set his paper aside and listened.

There it was again, the same tapping noise, like a tree limb brushing against a street sign. The sound seemed to be coming from down on the street. When he went to the window and looked outside, he saw the flag end of a coat disappearing around the corner. Holy, holy, holy. He kept repeating the word, first in his head and then out loud. It was a broken-off exclamation of surprise, something he was hardly even aware of thinking until he heard his own voice.

He bounded out of the office and took the stairs at a gallop. The street directly in front of the building was deserted, but he knew which way the coat had gone. He followed after it. He felt the kind of rolling surge of high energy he had sometimes felt as a teenager, when he would have to stop whatever he was doing to rush into the field behind his house and hurl a softball or a tennis ball as hard as he could, then push off from the grass to chase it down. He smacked a parking meter with his hand as he rounded the corner of the sidewalk. At the end of the block, he saw the coat vanishing behind the shining silver window of a building, the polished black heel of a shoe flashing in its wake. He redoubled his speed.

"Wait!" he shouted. "Hold up!"

He was halfway down the street before the figure in the coat reappeared, taking two steps away from the corner of the building. He stood there with all the calm of a street sign, the wind parting slowly around him. Something about the way he held his arm extended toward the brick wall, like a diver keeping his line in reach, told Luka that the man was blind, though he was not wearing dark glasses or carrying a cane. The tapping noise Luka had heard from his office must have been the sound of his shoes striking the sidewalk.

Luka slowed to a jog as he closed the gap. "Hey." He was still breathing hard from his run down the stairs. "Hey, I'm – " He gasped. "I'm Luka – " Another gasp. "Luka Sims."

The blind man cocked his head to one side. "Are you real?" He placed a peculiar stress on the word "real."

It felt so satisfying to be talking to somebody that Luka found himself letting out a noise: a quick gust of genuine laughter. "Are you?" he said.

Something tightened inside the blind man's face. "It's been a long time since I could say so with any certainty."

"Here," Luka said. "Take my hand," and cautiously the blind man reached for it. The hand he gave Luka was dry and callused, particularly at the fingertips, and it twitched when Luka squeezed it. "There," Luka said. "I'm as real as that. That's about all I can guarantee."

The blind man nodded as if to say Close enough, then withdrew his hand.

"I didn't think there was anybody else left around here," Luka admitted, though it seemed ridiculous now, like a nightmare that had lost all its power as soon as the sun rose.

After a moment, the blind man asked, "What's happened? Can you tell me?"

"All I can give you is a theory." He switched into reporting mode. "It looks like the world – the other world, I should say – is shutting down. From what I can gather, there was some sort of virus over there, and it knocked out most of the population. Maybe all of the population, I don't know. And when they go, so do we. That seems to be the way it works. Mind you, all of this is just a theory. It doesn't explain what the two of us are still doing here."

"I came here across a desert," the blind man said.

And that evening, as he sat lightly on the cushions of Luka's sofa, like a paper kite poised to catch the wind, he was still recounting the story. He had finished off the last of the red wine and fettuccine Luka had prepared, and he was tearing tiny pieces of his napkin off and collecting them in his palm. "I thought it was only the whistling of the wind at first. It took me a while to hear the pulse." The blind man repeated the exact same detail for what must have been the sixth or seventh time, and Luka made another little affirmatory noise. He was unwilling to let the blind man go, unwilling to leave him alone for even the few seconds it would take to rinse the dishes or put the leftovers away, for fear that he would disappear. "All that sand, and it wouldn't stop moving," the blind man said, and when he brought his hands together, the confetti pieces of his napkin drifted to the floor.

They stayed up talking until long after the sun had set. Then Luka offered the blind man a place on his couch to sleep, and because it was late and the blind man was still tipsy from the wine, he accepted.

Luka lay awake half the night listening to him breathe.

The next morning he was still there, sitting on the sofa, running his hands over a wing-shaped piece of driftwood that Luka had fished out of the river. He had folded the blanket Luka had given him into a perfect square, positioning it in the center of his pillow. When he heard Luka come into the room, he said, "I think there must be more of us."

"More of us?"

"More of us left in the city."

"Why do you say that?"

The blind man was quiet for a long time. "Instinct."

And though Luka couldn't say why, he was inclined to agree. Since he had noticed the tapping noise outside his window, he had been quick to investigate any unusual sound: a nut falling from an oak tree, his refrigerator hatching another clutch of ice cubes. He would let the sounds sail around in his short-term memory until he was satisfied that he could identify them. Then he would get up and head to the window or the kitchen just to make sure. It was as though every sound that was not the wind or the birds or the river was by definition human. He imagined people all over the city, hundreds of them, trying everything they could think of to pierce through the walls of their solitude, but uncertain there was anybody out there. Hundreds of faces behind hundreds of windows. Hundreds of coats gliding around hundreds of corners. He was determined that he wouldn't stop looking until he had picked out every last one of them.

He and the blind man spent the day searching for anyone they could find. Luka tried to offer him his elbow as they started out, but the blind man refused it. "A man who's walked as far as I have doesn't need anybody's help," he said. Instead, he navigated by trailing his hand along the wall of whichever building they were passing, listening to the echo of his hard-soled shoes as they hit the sidewalk.

The two of them began at Luka's apartment building, venturing outward in a series of linked rings. "We should stay in one place," the blind man argued. "Other people are going to be out searching, too." And he had a point – someone could easily happen by the apartment building while they were away – but Luka was too restless to stay put. He preferred to take his chances in the city.

They walked down street after street, the blind man shouting out, "Hello?" and Luka shouting out, "Anybody?" every ten or twenty steps.

"Hello? Anybody? Hello? Anybody?"

They passed bus benches and empty storefronts and hundreds of abandoned cars, some of them stalled out in the middle of the road. There were paperback novels lying open on the sidewalk, and carry-away bags from Chinese restaurants, and even the occasional briefcase or backpack. Once they found a skateboard rolling back and forth in a drainage culvert, struggling against the wind. But they did not see any people. It occurred to Luka that this was the first morning in years he had failed to complete an edition of the Sims Sheet. And though it was true that the only reader he had discovered so far was a blind man, and so probably not a reader at all, he felt for a moment like a kid who had forgotten to do his homework. It was something he knew about himself, something he had long known: there was always a teacher standing somewhere over his shoulder.

As the day wore on, he and the blind man spiraled farther and farther away from their starting point, reaching the river on one side and the skirts of the conservatory district on the other, until the soft white-blue of the sky began to bruise over and they headed back to Luka's apartment building. It was understood between them that the blind man would stay another night. Or another two nights. Or another three. That he would stay as long as it took for them to discover or be discovered by someone.

Luka had no idea where the man usually made his home. He didn't seem to be the type of person who would have a pet or a lot of possessions to take care of. Luka wouldn't have been surprised if he slept in a different place every night, on whichever couch or bed or carpet he happened to find himself.

He woke up early the next morning to the smell of something cooking. He went into the kitchen.

The blind man had found a jar of batter in the refrigerator and was pressing waffles into shape between the hinged metal pans of a waffle iron. Luka could see the batter sizzling and darkening as it spilled over the circumference of the pan.

"You know you talk in your sleep," the blind man said.

As far as he could tell, Luka had not made so much as a sound as he entered. "I do? What do I say?"

"'They're still down there.' 'The best thing I've ever done.' That sort of thing."

Luka thought about it for a minute. "I have absolutely no idea what that means," he said.

He ate a plateful of the waffles, which were surprisingly well cooked – a perfect crisp brown at the edges, but fluffy at the center – and then the two of them set off into the city. They explored the same terrain they had covered the day before, but in straight lines this time rather than linked circles, to make sure they hadn't missed anybody. They had to take shelter under the awning of a liquor store during one of the city's sudden thunderstorms, but the rain lasted only a few minutes, and then they were off again.

It wasn't until late that afternoon that they found another survivor.

Her name was Minny Rings, and they spotted her trying on gloves behind the window of a discount clothing store. She gave a start and clutched her chest when Luka tapped on the window. Then she rushed outside exclaiming, "Thank God! Thank God!" She looked as though she wanted to wrap her arms around the two of them. Instead, though, she just put her fingers to the cuffs of their jackets for a moment. She had been dead less than a week, she said, when the only other people in her building, an old Russian woman and her son, who was even older, slipped out the bottom of the funnel. She hadn't seen anybody since. She had spent the last few days walking around her neighborhood, watching the birds fly from rooftop to rooftop, and rattling doorknobs to find out whether they were unlocked. She had made her way into dozens of empty shops and apartments, looking through piles of clothing, stacks of antique maps, and display cases full of jewelry. She had turned up a library of old books inside someone's painted wooden trunk, and she had filled most of the last couple of nights reading one of them.

"What book?" Luka asked.

"The Master and Margarita."

"Mikhail Bulgakov. I love that book."

"Me, too," she said. Luka watched as she brought her thumb and her forefinger to the corners of her lips. It looked as though she were trying to tug her smile down into a frown. A nervous tic, he supposed.

The blind man, who was leaning against the wall, took off one of his shoes and beat at the heel until a pebble rolled out. Then he squeezed his foot back inside. "The air is getting colder," he said suddenly, and sure enough, the sun was falling. The tops of the trees still caught its full light, but the trunks and the scaffolding of the lower limbs were sliced off by the hard shadows of the buildings, so that when Luka's vision blurred, he saw only the very highest branches. They looked like ornaments floating in the sky.

Minny touched Luka's arm. She asked, "Are you okay?"

"Why?"

"You looked like you were about to faint there."

"Did I? I'm just tired from walking, I guess. Tired and hungry. We haven't eaten anything since this morning."

"Mm-hmm. Look, what do you think about the two of you coming back to my place with me?" she said. "I don't want to be too – what? Forward. Pushy. But I'd rather not let you out of my sight right now. I'm just around the corner," she said hopefully, and she pointed her finger.

So Luka and the blind man followed her back to her apartment, which was a small one-bedroom on the ground floor of a converted school building, sparsely furnished with a few folding chairs and a coffee table. She brewed a pot of coffee, and later, after they had eaten, as the dishes soaked in the sink, she brought their talk gradually around to the crossing and the other world. She wanted to know how the two of them had died.,

"A car accident," Luka said. "I always knew I would die in a car accident, and that's exactly what happened. I was on the highway, and I hit the front wedge of one of those concrete dividing walls, and the car broke apart into a million pieces. It was like my body stopped and the rest of me just kept on going. Like a dream almost. It wasn't even raining. I just lost control of the wheel."

"And what about you?" Minny asked the blind man.

"Old age," he said after a short pause, which, like all his pauses, might have been either thoughtful or oblivious – Luka couldn't tell. "Old age and neglect."

The night had deepened outside, so that the lamps in the apartment, which had seemed so weak just an hour or so before, glowed like miniature, shining suns.

"And what happened to you?" Luka asked Minny.

"The same thing that happened to everyone else," she said. "The Blinks."

She seemed reluctant to say anything more, and Luka didn't press her.

He already knew most of the broad details, anyway. The rapidly progressing illness that began with an itching behind the eyes. The flight of the population from the coasts and the cities. The looting and the vandalism. The desperation and the brutality. He must have conducted a hundred interviews in the last few weeks of the newspaper, and the story had always been the same.

The conversation fell away, and the three of them sat quietly listening to the faucet drip into the sink. Every so often, the water would strike the edge of a metal pan with a whispery, cymbal-like brushing sound before it shifted and began falling into the soapy water again.

After a while, Minny excused herself to go to the bedroom. She wanted to finish reading her book. "I'm only about twenty pages from the end. It won't take me long. You don't mind, do you?"

"Go right ahead."

"Fantastic." She came back half an hour later, already dressed in her pajamas, and slipped the book onto a small wooden shelf that was recessed into the living room wall. She stood there for a long while with her hands resting on her hips. "I'm trying to remember what it was I was supposed to do," she said to herself. Then, after a few seconds, "Oh, well. I guess it will come to me eventually."

They stayed up another hour or so discussing their plans for the next day. Though Minny knew almost nothing about the city as it existed beyond the few blocks of her neighborhood, she wanted to join Luka and the blind man in their hunt for other survivors. It was decided that when morning came, if the three of them were still there and no one had disappeared, they would head deeper into the conservatory district together. It was Luka's feeling that where there were three people there were bound to be four, and where there were four there were bound to be five. "I'm not so sure about six and seven, though," he said. He tried to work up a little chuckle, a half-laugh for his half-joke, but he was too tired and it came out as a yawn.

The blind man had already fallen asleep in his chair. Luka swallowed a second yawn, and Minny took his arm.

"Look, I only have the one bed, but you're welcome to one side of it."

"Are you sure?"

"Mm-hmm. I'll sleep better that way."

"All right. Good," Luka said. He ended up brushing his teeth with his index finger, then washing his face with a shell-shaped piece of soap he found sitting on the rim of the bathroom sink. By the time he was finished, Minny had already turned off the bedroom light, but he could still see well enough to find his way to the other side of the bed. He stood above her for a moment. He was trying to adjust himself to the idea of sleeping next to another body. The world had swung around like a carousel, it seemed, and given him another chance.

"I think I need to finish my story," Minny said.

"The Bulgakov? I thought you did finish it."

"No, the other story. My story."

He pulled the blanket down and slid beneath the covers. "Shoot."

"Well, I was away from home when the virus hit. That's the important thing." She spoke slowly and deliberately, as though the story were a complicated maze of rooms she was trying to pick her way through for the first time. "I was at a sales convention in Tucson, Arizona. Office supplies. I used to sell office supplies to hospitals and state agencies. There were probably five hundred of us in the hotel, from all over the country. When the news came through, we all rushed for our rental cars. I just kept thinking that I wanted to see my dad again. Isn't that strange? It didn't make any sense. I hadn't spoken to my dad since I was a kid, and he was dead anyway, but he was all I could think about. Not my mom, not my boyfriend. My dad. But the hotel had set up a quarantine around the edge of the parking lot, and they wouldn't let any of us leave. I guess they thought somebody might have carried the virus in from out of state. I don't know. I managed to get one of the last few Cokes out of the vending machine in the lobby, then I went back up to my room. Most of the TV networks were already down, but a couple were showing footage of the virus from Great Britain. It was horrible. Bodies lying dead on the grass or propped up against trees. You're lucky you didn't have to see it." She shuddered. "Honestly. There was this one shot, from London, of these hundreds of shoes lying scattered around on a flat stretch of highway. Nothing but shoes. People must have thrown them off when they were running from something, I guess. Who knows what? I couldn't help turning the TV back on every so often to see if there was anything new, but there never was. By the end of the day the networks were nothing but static, except for one of the gossip channels that was airing some show about Hollywood weddings. A repeat, of course. No more Hollywood weddings. I think it was the next morning that I started to feel sick. I remember going into the bathroom for a glass of water, but not much else after that."

Here she stopped for a moment, and the remembering tone fell out of her voice. "I guess that's the whole story. I'm sorry. I just had to tell somebody."

"Can I ask you one question?" Luka said.

"Ask."

"How long was it before you died?"

"I don't really know," Minny answered. "My guess would be that I didn't make it through to the night."

She was resting on her side, hunched and facing away from him. All this time her feet had been swaying in slow half circles beneath the blankets, one grazing on top of the other, like waves covering each other over on the beach. He felt as though he could listen to the rustling sound they made forever. Just before he fell asleep, he heard her mutter, "The dishes," and the next thing he knew it was morning.

Once more, the blind man was already awake. He was helping Minny in the kitchen, filling the coffeemaker as she plugged the toaster oven into the wall. The three of them ate a light breakfast of English muffins with strawberry jelly, and then they started off into the city.

The streets seemed even emptier than before. Most of the trash – hamburger wrappers, ticket stubs, styrofoam cups – had been blown down to the river or collared inside the necks of various alleyways. The few pieces that remained were either too heavy or not aerodynamic enough to be lifted by the wind. A windup alarm clock. A rubber doorstop. A compact disc. They looked like part of some vast, citywide art installation: Things We Left Along the Way.

A banner was flapping between two flagpoles on the side of a building, tightening and relaxing like a sail luffing in a gentle breeze, but on the pavement everything was perfectly still. Luka kept his eyes open for any sign of human activity. He matched his step to Minny's. The blind man stayed a few paces ahead of them, running his hand along the walls and the windows, never stumbling as he stepped over the curb into the intersections of the empty streets.

Luka planned to lead them back to his office before the day was out. He was afraid he had neglected to close his window. Whether or not they found anybody, he didn't want to leave his equipment exposed to the rain. The mimeograph machine, in particular, barely worked on even the best of days: the crank often got stuck, or the drum fell loose, or the paper came through clotted with ink. He hated to imagine how it would operate with a few gallons of rainwater irrigating the machinery.

They stopped for a few minutes at a small, enclosed park on the corner of Seventeenth and Margaret Streets, where they lined up on one of the wrought-iron benches to rest their legs. Minny took her shoes off and began rubbing the soles of her feet, massaging them with her thumbs and then with her knuckles. "This is what a lifetime of driving from the door to the mailbox will get you," she complained. "Little-girl feet."

A pair of basketballs had drifted to a stop against the chain-link fence. Every so often a gust of wind would pass between them, and they would roll apart and come back together again with an oddly resonant thumping noise. Minny slipped her shoes back on, Luka tapped the blind man's shoulder, and the three of them headed back out toward the conservatory.

It was still early in the day when the blind man brought them up short, extending his left arm. "Did you hear that?" he asked.

Luka hadn't noticed anything. Neither had Minny.

"It sounded like a gunshot," the blind man said. "A few miles away."

He cocked his head and pointed. "There! There it was again!"

All at once, and without another word, he struck off at a fast walk. Luka and Minny had no choice but to follow after him. He appeared to know exactly where he was going. He made a right onto Third Avenue, sheering around a car that was tilted up onto the sidewalk, then took a left by the Ginza Street Shopping Mall. He never turned down a blind alley or into a courtyard, never even paused. Luka couldn't figure out how he did it. Maybe it had something to do with the shape of the wind, the way various sounds came together or frayed apart in his ears. Or maybe it was his sense of equilibrium, which must have been as finely calibrated as a compass. Luka made a note to ask him whenever they got where they were going.

The blind man took them past a library and a gymnasium – four blocks, eight blocks, ten – leading them swiftly toward the river and the monument district. By the time the next gunshot was fired, the sound was much clearer. "Damned if I can't hear it," Luka said.

"It's a signal." The blind man scraped past a wooden barrel and let out a huff. "Someone's trying to get our attention."

"Why didn't we think of that?" Luka asked.

"We did," the blind man said. "But I didn't imagine either of you were likely to have a gun."

It was two more blocks before they broke out from behind the mass of buildings. They rounded the concrete wall of a parking garage, took a few steps up a wheelchair ramp, and saw stretched out before them the broad, grassy clearing at the center of the monument district. A spokelike pattern of walkways radiated from the monument, which was a polished marble obelisk supported on a narrow pedestal. A man with a pistol was standing beside it firing into the air.

And milling all around him, their voices raised in conversation, must have been two hundred people. A half dozen others were trickling in from the other side of the field, converging at the sound of the gunshot.

Minny gasped and took a step back, knocking heavily into Luka. "I'm sorry," she began. "It's just… it's just that," and she swallowed and slowly shook her head. "It's just that I never thought I would see so many people again."

"It's a big city," Luka said, by which he meant to say, Neither did I. And without thinking, he took her hand and pressed it to his chest. Then they followed the blind man out of the shadows and into the body of the crowd.