The Brief History of the Dead

FOUR. THE MILES

The first two days of the journey went by without trouble. From her seat in the sledge, Laura followed a steady course to the northwest, using the GPS system and the onboard navigational equipment to plot her course to the station. She had never driven a sledge before, but the controls were surprisingly easy to operate. The weather was clear and there was a glasslike transparency to the air, so that she rarely had to stop for more than a few minutes at a time. The runners beneath the sledge, heated to diminish the abrasion of the ice, were capable of carrying her over all but the largest gaps and fissures, and the only time she had to vary her path was when a shoulder of rock or ice lanced its way up through the ground and forced her to circle around to the other side. She drove through the long daybreak of the Antarctic fall, resting only when the sun was high enough to rise up off the ice in a disorienting glare. Then she continued driving until the day was over and the evening was snuffed from the sky.

At sunset, when she stopped to rest, she had to unpack her equipment. The tent was easy to assemble. It was ornamented with a pull cord that caused it to pop from its bag and stretch out like a life raft until it fully expanded. She would walk around the edges knocking stakes into the ground, and then, when the wires were secure, she would carry her sleeping bag and cooking gear inside and bed down for the night. That was it; the whole procedure took less than fifteen minutes. In the morning, when she was ready to leave, all she had to do was tug on the pull cord again to make the tent collapse in on itself, withering into a perfect little cylinder that made a hissing noise as it shrank. A tag above the entrance read, WARNING: ALWAYS LEAVE DOOR OPEN WHEN DEFLATING TENT, and every time she saw it, she imagined the thing exploding like a balloon as it tightened around its bubble of trapped air, drifting to the ice in a thousand tatters of pink cloth. It was the kind of tent that was purchased by wealthy corporate executives who intended to hike the Rockies or the Appalachians someday but never quite managed to leave the city. Eventually, their children would set it up in the middle of the living room, between the sofa and the fireplace, and pretend they were pioneers. And who's to say they weren't?

Ever since she was a little girl, Laura had felt like a pioneer, passing over into the wilderness of the rest of her life. She remembered lying beneath her bed on her twelfth birthday, staring up into the orchardlike rows of the box springs and thinking how strange it was that she had no idea where she would be a year later, on the day she turned thirteen, and that she had had no idea where she would be today the year before, on the day she turned eleven. Certainly she could never have guessed that she would find herself lying underneath her bed staring at the box springs and wondering about the way time was put together. Why was it that everything that had happened to her in the past seemed so clear, but as soon as she turned toward the future, it all went dim and faded to nothing? Was that what it meant to be alive – moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step? Sometimes she felt that way.

The tent kept her warm at night, or as warm as she could reasonably expect to be. She found the hum of its soft coil oddly comforting, like the sound of car wheels hissing over wet asphalt – a sound she always associated with the million rainy fall nights she had spent listening to the traffic flow past her bedroom window. But it was obvious that the heating system had not been designed for polar use. The heat from the coil radiated though the bottom of the tent, which caused the ice to melt, flow toward the edges, and refreeze, creating a sort of ovenlike seal. When she woke in the morning, there was always a shallow puddle beneath the floor that rippled back and forth as she shifted her weight. It made her feel as if she were sleeping in a waterbed.

She tried to knock the ice from the fabric before she pried the stakes out of the ground, but she was never able to get rid of it all, and when she activated the pull cord and the tent deflated, fragments of it would invariably crack and go spitting through the air, gliding across the ridges for twenty yards or more. She was usually able to load the sledge and set off again before the sun got too high. She estimated that she had covered sixty miles on her first day of travel and eighty miles on her second – better time than Puckett and Joyce had made, she imagined. The wind and the snow had long since covered their tracks, but for her the weather had been nothing but stillness and sunshine. It felt good to be moving. The crying fits that had come over her in the shelter seemed to have fallen away. She felt stronger than she had in weeks.

Soon she would wind her way down the ice stream and through the coastal pass. She would cross from the land mass onto the Ross Ice Shelf. And not long after that – a matter of days, probably – she would make it to the station. What a relief it would be to have other human beings to talk to again.

But on her third day of sledging, the temperature dropped and the sky clouded over, and the wind began whipping up pennants of ice and snow. Before she knew it, she was in the middle of a blizzard. She could still move forward, but the wind was coming from the northwest now, directly in front of her, which made the traveling slow and difficult. Pellets of hardened snow tapped against the window of the sledge, so much of it that it sounded like leaves crackling in a fire. Her headlights bored a narrow tunnel through the blizzard, but the snow confused her vision, making everything go white. She kept altering her focus as she tried to see more deeply into the storm, and the snow would catch her gaze and carry it back to the windshield in a series of shifting planes. Before so much as an hour had passed, her eyes had begun to ache and burn, though she knew she couldn't look away. The spindrift was thick, hiding the telltale cross ridges and depressions that marked the openings of the crevasses. She had to watch the ground carefully to avoid them.

The runners of the sledge were outfitted with circular frames of flat metal paddles – she thought of them as flippers – that slapped out in front of the sledge as it moved forward and then drew back underneath as it traveled on. They were a safety device, a sort of makeshift cantilever designed to carry her over any fissures she happened to encounter – or at least any fissures no more than six feet wide. Several times, she had felt the sledge plummeting forward suddenly and then lifting and righting itself before it moved on and she knew she had crossed over another crevasse. She felt as though she were driving a car down a crumbling road. The supporting ice of the glaciers had been decaying for decades, and rifts as deep as subway trenches could open in a matter of hours, sealing themselves off just as quickly. If she slipped, she wouldn't be discovered until the ice finished melting sometime in the middle of the next century. But she had been trained by years of city driving to recognize every bump and jar she felt as just another flaw in the road. If she was leaning forward in her seat and a particular sort of lurch went through her body, she naturally assumed that she had hit a pothole. It was a form of muscle memory.

Muscle memory. Mussel memory. Alive, alive-O!

The storm continued for the next few days. She had to trust to her compass and the few flickering signals that registered on her GPS monitor to maintain her bearing. She knew when she had reached the ice stream that connected the land mass to the bay by the number of knolls and ridges that appeared in her path, and also by the generally brashy quality of the ice, but she had no idea how long it would take her to make it through the pass onto level ground.

The snow fell heavy and fast. Sometimes she didn't see the obstacles that lay ahead of her until they were only a few feet away. She had to drive very slowly to avoid them. She was lucky to cover a mile or two in an hour, ten or fifteen in a day. The runners of the sledge dipped, lifted, and dipped again as she made her way through the drifts, and the snowflakes clustered together like stars on her windshield. By the end of the day, when she lay down in her sleeping bag and closed her eyes, her body would seem to rock back and forth inside itself, and she would see streamers of white light slanting across her vision. Even in her dreams, she felt herself sledging across the ice and the darkness.

She was working harder than she ever had in her life, and she was exhausted. She had chopped wood before. She had mixed concrete. She had even helped the Coca-Cola Homes for Neighbors Club build a row of apartments on the side of a hill, clearing the stumps and brush, laying the foundations and everything. But this was nothing compared to the effort of keeping a two-ton sledge on course through the center of a snowstorm. Whenever she stopped to rest, for even a few minutes, a stabbing pain would tear through the muscles in her calves and forearms, and she would have to remind herself to breathe. It was not so much the amount of exercise she was subjecting herself to, but the way she was holding her body at tension for so long. It took an hour or more of total stillness before her muscles would begin to go slack, followed by a comforting numbness that made her want to drift off to sleep.

She was too tired to cook at night, and she was tempted to leave the metal pots and the Primus stove in the back of the sledge, but she carried them into the tent with her so that she would be able to heat her coffee in the morning. The temperature sometimes dipped to forty or fifty degrees below zero, and she would have to spend a good half hour shivering in her coat and gloves before the tent truly began to warm up. She ate two or three multivitamins and a handful of dehydrated biscuits as she waited, and sometimes also a protein bar, and sometimes also a piece of chocolate, and she allowed a few chips of ice to melt on the surface of her tongue. Then she stripped to her long Johns, tightened the drawstrings of the sleeping bag around her, and listened to the side wall of the tent going taut and slack and taut again, bellying in and out as it took the wind like a sail.

On the eighth day of the storm, she was traveling on a downhill slope when a spur of rock came rearing up out of the snow and filled her windshield. Her heart rose up in her chest. She swerved to avoid the rock, but it was too late.

She rammed into the spur at the rear corner and heard the solid crunch of something breaking. The sledge spun around twice and gradually drifted to a stop. She let go of the steering mechanism. Her skin was covered in sweat, and her stomach had tightened into a knot. The droning sound of the sledge slowly died away, and its runners settled into the snow. She checked herself for wounds. She seemed to be okay – no bleeding, no broken bones – but she wasn't sure about the sledge. She climbed outside onto a half dozen chunks of rock and ice that had been knocked loose by the collision.

She made her way toward the back end of the vehicle, holding on to the upper rail with her gloves, the snow twisting around her in an obscuring shroud. She had heard stories about people who had become so disoriented in snowstorms that they had lost their sense of direction only a few feet from their front doors, people who went stumbling and weaving into the tempest with their arms stretched out in front of them like zombies. She knew better than to let go of the rail. She found the spot where the sledge had run into the spur. A long rent had been torn into the wood and metal, exposing the inside of the storage hutch. Her duffel bag was wedged inside the hole, so that only a thin crack of space remained open to the air, bordered with a row of jagged wooden teeth. She could hear the wind passing through it with a whistling noise.

She sank to her knees, probing at the snow around the runners to make sure nothing had fallen out. She couldn't feel anything – the bulge of the duffel bag seemed to have sealed the breach in the hutch. She risked a short walk uphill, heading directly toward the spur, but all she saw was a tapering strip of wood and a single, palm-sized lump of black rock. When she was satisfied that she wouldn't find anything else, she staggered back downhill. She turned the sledge around and continued along the channel of the ice stream.

It would be more than a month before she discovered exactly what she had left behind on the slope and the full consequences of her accident became clear to her.

That night, after she sealed the hole in the sledge with a strip of plywood, she found herself replaying a certain incident from her childhood. It came to her while she was pitching the tent, whirling and condensing in her memory like a tiny runaway planet, so that by the time she fastened the door it had returned to her in all its particulars. The incident was an inconsequential one – of no importance whatsoever, really. But then most of the things she remembered, most of the things anybody remembered, were of no natural importance – were they? – and that never stopped them from rising into the light.

In her memory she was seven years old, and her mother had just taken her out of school for a dentist's appointment. Only that morning, her mother had said, "Now don't let me forget, we have to get you to the dentist by two-thirty. What time do we have to get you to the dentist by?" and Laura had answered, "Two-thirty o'clock," and her mother had said, "There's no o'clock to it, hon. It's just two-thirty," which was why she remembered what time the appointment was supposed to be.

She buckled herself into the car seat and waited for her mother to finish talking to the woman with the orange vest who stood by the front door in the afternoons. Laura and her friends had made an I-Spy game out of the orange vests: whoever could spot the most was the winner. She had noticed that there were always more of them on the days when the sirens went off than on the days when they didn't.

Only recently had she grown tall enough to see out the window of the car without rising onto her knees. As her mother climbed into the driver's seat and the engine made the coughing and shredding noise it always made when it was turning over, she noticed an unusual thing. On the roof of the house across the street was something she had never seen before. It looked like a spinning silver pumpkin trapped inside a metal grate.

"What's that?" she asked her mother. "What's what?"

"That thing," she said, pointing. "The silver ball on that roof."

"Oh. They have those all over the place. It's a – " Laura watched the motions of doubt appear in her mother's face as she began to answer the question and then realized she didn't have the words. "You know, I'm not sure what it's called. It's part of the house's circulation system. I can tell you that."

Earlier in the week, Laura had watched a TV program about the body's circulation system. She remembered the image of a man whose skin peeled away to show his blood pumping through him, a loose basketry of red and blue vessels surrounding a large, throbbing heart. The connection seemed hazy to her. "A circulation system like for blood?" she was about to ask, when another car came hurtling around the corner of the parking lot, driving backward, and punched into the edge of their front bumper.

The car scraped along their driver's-side door, not grinding to a stop until it had lined up with them window for window, rearview mirror for rearview mirror, pressed against them as though it were backing into a parking space. Laura saw the driver pause and shake her head before she reached over to apply the emergency brake.

Softly, as though she were simply commenting on the weather, her mother said, "Well, goddamn it." Her face usually had a strange, almost strict expression when she was driving, but for the moment, at least, it was completely empty. She was one of those people who truly became beautiful only when they showed no sign of thought or feeling on their faces, like bright, blank flowers unfolding their petals in the sun. Later, after Laura had grown up and moved away, that was how she would remember her mother – as a woman caught in a lovely thoughtlessness.

"Are you okay?" her mother asked her. Laura said that she was fine.

Her mother lowered her window and motioned for the woman in the other car to do the same. The woman's window sank away, taking a dim reflection of them with it. She said, "I'm having an unbelievably rotten day."

"So am I," Laura's mother said. "At least now I am."

"Like you wouldn't believe," the woman said.

Laura's mother began working a muscle in her jaw, but almost immediately she became plain again. "Listen, maybe you should pull forward and let me open my door."

"I can't," the woman said. "That's one of the problems."

"What do you mean, that's one of the problems?"

"There's something wrong with my car. It won't pull forward. It will only go in reverse. That and my kid left his books at home, and the stationery store was closed."

"Then maybe you should back up and let me open my door," Laura's mother said.

"Oh. Okay." The woman released her brake and inched backward, scraping along the side panel of the car. She slowly drifted out of contact with them. She switched her motor off and rested her forehead on the padded arch of the steering wheel, lacing her fingers together behind her neck. It was then that Laura heard her moan – a low, soft animal sound that seemed to swell up from somewhere deep inside her.

"The cow goes moo," Laura said.

"Quiet, honey."

Her mother unlatched the door. It made a creaking and buckling sound as it swiveled around the crimp, and almost at once, the car's warning bell began to ding. The bell usually came on when the door was opened by even so much as a crack, though sometimes it didn't. It was something that Laura found impossible to predict.

"Wait here," her mother told her. She shut the door and strode over to the other car. Laura could hear what she was saying through the open window. "Do you want to call the police, or do you want me to?" After a few seconds she repeated herself. "Hello? Do you want to call the police, or should I?"

"You're not supposed to move a person with a broken bone. You're supposed to wait for the ambulance," the woman answered.

"Did you break something?"

She shook her head. "I was talking about the car."

"Oh, for crying out – " Laura's mother frowned and cocked her hand in the air. Laura thought that she was going to cuff the woman, but she allowed the gesture to go slack and in the end only slapped the roof of her car lightly with her palm. The noise was still loud enough to make the woman jump in her seat.

"Look, if your car doesn't work, you shouldn't be driving it in the first place."

"It was working just fine when I left the house. Then the stationery store wasn't open, and I dropped Eric's books off, and when I came back outside, it would only go backward." The woman leaned over to pick something up from the floorboard and she straightened back up with a phone to her ear. She pressed a few buttons.

"And to top it all off," she said after a moment, "it looks like my phone is dead."

"I'll make the call," Laura's mother told her. "You wait right here. Don't go driving off anywhere. Just… wait." She returned to the car, sat down, and fished the telephone out of her purse. Laura listened to her telling the police operator all about the accident: who had hit whom, where they were located, how many people were involved. "No, no injuries," she said. "But the other driver seems a bit… off, I guess you could say."

Laura could see the woman sitting in her car. She was still holding the telephone to her cheek. Her knuckles were as white as candle wax.

"Mom," Laura asked, "why is she squeezing that phone so hard?"

Then the woman began to cry.

As they waited for the police, the school's front drive became crowded with the cars of all the parents and child-care workers who were lining up for the three-fifteen bell. The sunlight reflected off their windshields, hubcaps, and bumpers, filling the air with knives.

After a while, Laura began to feel an ache in her muscles from the impact of the crash. She unbuckled her seat belt, rested her head on her mother's lap, and stared at the ceiling.

"Well, it looks like we'll have to reschedule your dentist's appointment, hon," her mother said.

"Oh, that's right," said Laura. "I forgot all about it."

And when the sirens came, she didn't know whether they were the police cars pulling into the lot or those other sirens, the ones that sounded when the bombs were going to fall, the sirens of the orange vests.

It took her six more days to make it through the pass onto the Ross Ice Shelf. Six days of continuously falling snow that spun through the air in nets and skeins and lashes. Six days of collapsing ice and stone embankments that rose up inside the storm like baited traps. She had been afraid that she would miss the gap altogether, veering off the path and dead-ending against the side of the mountain, but she woke up one morning to an unexpectedly full silence, and when she stepped outside she found a plain of unblemished white ice stretching into the distance before her. Her relief was immense. The weather must have cleared while she was asleep. She turned around to see a line of cliffs and the tongue of the ice stream behind her. Immediately she understood what had happened: she had cut through the notch the day before, without even realizing it.

She packed the sledge quickly in the rising light and set out again. If the weather persisted – and that was quite an "if" so close to the coast – she might reach the station before exhaustion finally took hold of her. But conditions could change at the snap of a finger, and she wanted to cover as much distance as she could before they did.

Soon the sledge was traveling so swiftly that twin arcs of snow shot out from beneath the runners, pattering onto the ice with a quiet slapping sound. As the noon hour approached, the sunlight shone from off the snow as if from a layer of pressed foil. Beneath the sledge was the ice, and beneath the ice was the ocean, and she was surprised that she couldn't feel the circulation of the water down there. She had thought that she would be able to. But the shelf ice seemed just as solid, just as anchored, as the continental ice had been. Of course, the continental ice wasn't nearly as impermeable as it had been a few decades ago, before the great melting began. And from the little – very little – geology she had studied, she knew that even the land itself was never as stable as it seemed. Beneath the glaciers, after all, was the stone, and beneath the stone was the magma, and no matter where you stood on the planet, you were always bobbing around like a cork in open water. Perhaps she had just gotten used to the feeling.

Every time she climbed out of the sledge, and every morning when she left the jacketing warmth of her tent, the vigor of the cold would make her catch her breath. How long had it been since she'd set out from the shelter? Two weeks? Three? Already the days had become colder. The string that bound the sun to the horizon had grown shorter. She would make it through six or seven hours of sledging before the darkness settled over the ice – maybe eight hours if there were a few low-hanging clouds along the skyline to reflect the final traces of the light. Then she would erect her tent and go to sleep. The GPS system was working again, and if she wanted, she could have driven through the night, guided by the khaki-colored markings on the monitor. But she was tired. And beyond that, she was afraid. She was afraid that she would reach the station and somehow fail to see it.

She kept thinking about the time shortly after she graduated from college when she drove home from a late-night party and woke up on the front lawn of the house she shared with her boyfriend. She had spent the night sleeping in her car. Its fuel cell was depleted, but the front lights were still burning, and a group of children were standing above her tapping on the window. "I'd get out of here if I was you," one of them said when she opened the door, a boy with a globe of frizzy red hair. "The guy who lives in that house is an a-s-s-hole." Which, as it later turned out, he was. She had spent the next few weeks wondering what had happened to her. She remembered struggling to stay awake, then turning onto her street with a sense of exquisite relief, but after that nothing at all. She was amazed that she hadn't folded the car around a tree or a streetlamp. Or a camper van or a swing set or a living room. It was possible to drift without thinking into what you were looking for, but it was just as possible to drift right past it into something far worse. She must have come to a stop on her own front lawn by nothing more than the purest luck.

Sometimes, as she traveled across the ice shelf, the sky would gray over and the snow would begin to fall again, but it never lasted for long. Though there were mornings when she woke to find the tracks her sledge had left in the ice obscured by a covering of fresh powder, there were just as many mornings when they were lit to a razor's sharpness by the brightening sun and she could see them extending into the distance like carvings on a wax tablet.

Once, after a night of soft but persistent winds, she found the ground outside her tent scattered with thousands of marble-sized balls of snow. They were lined up along the sheltered side of the ridges, and were so delicate that they collapsed into a heap of crystals the second she touched them. She had never seen anything like them. Even the vibration of her footsteps was enough to make them collapse, she discovered, so she tried not to step too close to them.

Tried not to kill them, was how she thought of it. In the past few weeks, ever since Puckett and Joyce had left, everything around her seemed to have developed a personality.

By the time she loaded the sledge, the breeze had changed direction slightly, lifting the balls out from behind the ridges. They went skittering away across the shining field like mice. She powered up the sledge and started out toward the northwest.

She knew that she must be getting closer to the rim of the ice shelf. Fissures and crevices were appearing in the ice more and more frequently now. She slowed down whenever she saw a gap approaching, easing over it until the flippers caught on the other side and she was sure she could move forward. Once or twice she felt the balance of the sledge tipping over and had to back up and change course until the break narrowed.

At the bottom of one of the fissures, she spotted a dark thread of water. A few minutes later, an egg-shaped opening appeared in the ice, and she stopped the sledge to peer over the edge. There was a sunken pool of water inside, some ten feet down, telescoped by the walls of the tunnel. She could see it rising and falling, lingering for a few seconds at either end like the pectoral muscles of a sleeping giant. It was the ocean. She was sure of it. She was at that margin where the shelf ice began to break apart into pack ice, separating into mile-long chunks that bumped into one another as the currents tugged them back and forth. The station couldn't be more than a day or two away.

She moved out again with a renewed intensity. The few clouds that had been in the sky at dawn were gone now, and the air was scrubbed clean, so transparent that it played tricks with her notions of distance. Late in the afternoon, she saw a faraway structure with the low roof and squared off walls of the station, and her heart began to race. She accelerated toward the building, but suddenly it was gone. She activated the magnification feature on her windshield, but still she couldn't see it. She climbed down from the sledge to take a look around. Half a dozen steps behind the left runner she found the object she had seen. It was a juice box. A juice box with the low walls and squared off roof of the station. The familiar red and white Coca-Cola wave was slinking across the front, and the C. C. Juice slogan was printed just beneath it: "The Great Taste of Cola… in a Juice!" Somebody must have dropped it traveling across the ice shelf. One of the scientists from the station, maybe. Or Puckett or Joyce.

For a moment she thought to pick it up and throw it into the sledge, but then a surge of irritation went through her and she backed up to take a run at the thing. The box made a wonderful popping sound when she kicked it, sailing across the ice in a long, straight line.

She climbed back into the sledge. The incident made her remember the story she had heard about the girl who was raised in a room with no horizontal lines. She couldn't recall whether the story was true or simply a thought experiment, but the room, as she remembered it, was decorated with a series of black vertical stripes on the walls, and the floor and ceiling were curved to give the illusion that the vertical stripes were continuous. On the child's first birthday, the story went, she was taken out of the room. She had learned how to recognize vertical forms, but not horizontal ones, so that if she was situated on a table, say, or a platform, she would crawl right off the edge, but she would never run into the corner of a wall or the leg of a chair. Her condition lasted for about a month before her visual sense finally corrected itself.

The experiment was supposed to have proven something about the development of human perception, though for the life of her Laura couldn't remember what.

As far as she could tell, the only thing it demonstrated was that babies were capable of being tricked, and who would be surprised by that?

That same day, as the last slice of the sun was sinking behind the ice, she saw another form taking shape in her windshield, a low-bodied object at the very corner of the horizon. It shone oddly in the fading light, blinking on and off as she bumped across the ridges. At first she thought it was just a mirage – or worse, another juice container.

But then she spotted the klieg lights standing on either side of it, two dazzling panels of honed white light. They showed the building in all its contours. There was no doubt about it this time. She had finally reached the station.