Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

Before long the men from Coca-Cola had to leave for an appointment. Laura's old roommate had no other plans for the afternoon, though, and she attached herself to Marion and Phillip as they went through the clearing conducting their survey. "Do you know a Laura Byrd? Does the name ring any bells?" A good number of the people they spoke to had never heard of Laura before, but more than a few of them thought they recognized the name and almost half knew her well enough to show some surprise.

How could so many people come together in an unfamiliar city and remember the exact same woman?

It was no simple coincidence, Marion was sure of that.

By the time they gave up for the day, it was late afternoon, less than an hour before they were scheduled to meet Marion's mother for dinner. The shadows at their feet were already stretching out to meet the horizon, and the crowds in the park had dwindled to almost nothing. They walked the last few blocks home and collapsed at opposite ends of the couch. Marion was as tired as she had been at any time since she'd first arrived in the city, when she had slept for seventeen hours straight. But for once she didn't mind. This was a different sort of weariness than the weariness she'd experienced when she was alive. It was a good weariness, that pleasant mental fatigue that comes from too much sunlight and too much expectation. She watched as Phillip closed his eyes and napped for a few minutes. He had always been like that – able to drop off to sleep in a matter of seconds, then rouse himself again twenty minutes later, his attention sharpened to a fine point. She found the ability too mysterious to be jealous of it. After he woke up, she gave him a moment to yawn and stretch, and then asked, "So what do you think it's all about?"

"You mean Laura?"

"I don't understand how all those people could have known her, Phillip. And I don't understand why she isn't here. Where is she?"

"You're just full of unanswerable questions today, aren't you?" he said. "Maybe she is here somewhere, but she just hasn't turned up yet. Or maybe she's changed so much that we can't recognize her. Or maybe she's still alive. Maybe there's a different afterlife for everybody, and this is Laura's, and we're all just waiting for her to die so that everything will make sense to us." "Don't say that."

"Or then again, maybe the man who asked us for the match this afternoon was right, and God is just out there playing games with us to see how we'll react. Or maybe it's chance. In the end, maybe it's nothing but chance." He smoothed a crease from his pants as he stood up. "There's the long answer. The short answer is, I don't know. But I'm glad we're here, Marion."

He went to the sink to wash his face. She heard him running the water until it was hot enough for the pitch to change, then the rapid welling sound as he cupped his hands to the faucet followed by the sudden collapsing splash, like a tarp giving way, as he emptied the water onto his face. When he came back out, his hair was slicked back in mixed wet and dry strands, except for a thin loop that had come loose from the thatch to dangle over his eye. "We're here," he concluded, "and things are pretty good, and that's enough for me."

He sat down beside her on the couch. She was tired and so she rested her head on his shoulder.

"This is nice," she said after a while. "You didn't really help me with my question, but this is nice."

"I know it is. It's been a long time, hasn't it?"

"What do you mean, 'It's been a long time'?"

"A long time since we could just sit together quietly like this. A long time since you would let me, or since I would risk it. You know, sometimes I look back on the last ten years of our lives, and it feels like we were nothing but roommates. I was the bumbling roommate you had to pick up after, and you were the sensitive roommate I had to keep from upsetting. I don't know what did it to us. Maybe it was Laura's going away to college, the two of us being alone together after all that time. I don't know. But that's what we were, isn't it? The crazy thing is that I didn't even notice until it was all over. It took dropping dead, of all things, for me to see things so clearly."

It sounded as though he were about to laugh, but the laugh turned into a spasmlike inhalation, and he sneezed loudly, jarring her head with his shoulder. "Whew! Excuse me. I wasn't expecting that. Anyway, that's what I mean by 'It's been a long time.' I mean I'm glad I'm your husband again. I'm glad you're my wife. If my vote counts for anything, I say we keep it that way. I must have tried to tell you that a dozen times today, when you haven't been so… frustrating."

As usual, his speech had cracked apart into a mass of springs and cogs at the end, the parts of a statement rather than the statement itself. He had left her with the impression that he was about to clarify himself but had decided to opt out at the last second. Still, she knew what he meant, even if she wasn't quite sure how to respond to him. Finally she just gave up and said what she was thinking, which was, "I didn't know you'd realized anything was wrong."

The look he gave her was as old as time. He leaned over and said, "I'm going to change out of these clothes before we head back out, okay?"

Then he stood up and disappeared into the bedroom, shutting the door.

It was a mistake for her to think of him as innocent, uncomplicated. She knew that. But there was something about his fussi-ness, his obedience to certain long-established routines, along with the carelessness with which he presented himself to the world, that made it easy for her to imagine him as a child. She had imagined, for instance, that he was the one who had never seen their marriage clearly – or seen himself clearly, for that matter. That he was the one who was half-broken by every little sickness that came his way, and by nostalgia for the way he used to be, and by worry over what had happened to Laura. But she was beginning to suspect that it had been her all along. She was the innocent one. She was the child.

She felt for a moment the child's guilt and panic that she was to blame for something – for finally getting to know him, maybe. She knew that it wasn't the getting to know him part that would convict her in the end. It was the finally.

She cast the feeling aside and forced herself up from the couch. It was five-thirty, almost time to leave. She had to get dressed. Outside, the sun had all but disappeared, and the apartment had filled with those textureless blue shadows that were just a few degrees darker than the sky. She could hear Phillip snapping his jacket together in the bedroom. Each snap locked into place with a satisfying little click, much louder than it ought to have been in the falling darkness. She went to the door and prepared to knock, lifting her hand to the wood. It was an interesting sound.

The bulges in the snow were graves. At first Laura had mistaken them for natural formations, like the terraced ridges that sometimes appear on beaches or deserts when the wind blows just swiftly enough to carve its own patterns in the sand and just slowly enough not to disturb them. She had even – shamefully, she now realized – climbed on top of one of them, balancing herself at a flat spot along the crest to look out over the ice toward the bay. But as the days passed and the station remained deserted, the truth gradually dawned on her. The zoologists and technicians who had manned the station were dead. She had read their names on the duty roster that was tacked to the bulletin board: Armand Koen at the top, Nathan Sayles at the bottom, and between them eighteen others. Twenty names for twenty graves, strung out along the back side of the building like a row of beads.

One of them must have stayed alive long enough to bury the others – but who, she wondered, had buried him? What had killed them all in the first place? And how long ago had they died? She searched the station carefully, but it offered her no clues: no journal, no voice recording, not even a message inscribed on a post somewhere, a single cryptic word like the settlers of Roanoke Island had left: "Croatoan."