Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

Perhaps it was only paranoia on his part, but in his experience there was never any shortage of people waiting for the opportunity to fuck someone else over, and he had decided long ago that he would do everything in his power – walk any mile, tell any lie – to ensure that he was always the person who did the fucking and never the person who got fucked.

He was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, which was still slick with ice from the freezing weather. He watched as one, two, three different people lost their footing and fell to the pavement trying to maneuver around him. It was as though he were participating in some kind of effortless carnival game. Ding! Ding! Ding! and one after another they went down.

Sooner or later somebody was bound to ask him about the trash can, and so he made his way gingerly onto the strip of snow at the curb and began walking. The cabs were not running. It was useless to try to drive under such conditions. The ice was still hard on the ground and the sun had not come out from behind the clouds all morning. What a totally shit day. Maybe later on, after the foot traffic and the rising temperatures and the first few daredevil drivers had pounded a lane of slush down the middle of the road, the cabbies would clock in for the afternoon and begin patrolling the city. But until then he would just have to hoof it, trash can or no trash can.

He remembered what it was like when he was growing up and the salt trucks would invariably roll out to blanket the streets after the first couple of inches of snow had fallen. He wished that they were still around, those massive trucks with their massive drivers. But of course not. They were just another one of the millions of things that had been relinquished to the other world. He blamed Laura Byrd. She had never known any salt truck drivers, and so there were no salt truck drivers in the city. She had never known any software designers, and so there were no software designers. She had known plenty of petty little customer service types, and street people, and dirty screaming kids. But she had never known Lindell's wife or his girlfriend or his poor dead mother, and so he had to make do without his family.

Instead, look what he was left with – what they were all left with. There across the street from him, for instance, a woman had taken up a slumping posture on a cracked bus bench, where she was playing with a red rubber ball. Behind the window of her apartment, another woman was singing to herself as she slipped her arms into the kind of orange nylon vest worn by school safety officers. Inside a restaurant, a man was using a white plastic fork to eat what looked like a plate of tuna salad on iceberg lettuce, a paper napkin tucked into his collar like a bib. What a sorry lot.

Of the whole group of them, he was the only one who had had the good sense to muster everyone together in one place after the city emptied out.

What do you do when the world has dropped out from under you and you want to attract attention? You take a gun, and you fire it.

You would think that somebody else would have been bright enough to figure that out, but no.

Some guy was standing on the corner of the street handing out newspapers. Lindell tried to duck him, but the man stepped into his path.

"Some weather we're having lately, isn't it?" Oh great, he thought. A weather conversation. "Yes, it is." "So can I ask what you're carrying in the trash can?" "Nothing important. Nothing unusual."

The man grinned and passed his hand through the air. "Headline: Man Lugs Trash Can Through the Snow, Refuses to Explain."

Just then, a woman came up beside the newspaperman with a couple of styrofoam cups in her hands. She kissed him on the cheek. "All they had was decaf, so I brought us some hot chocolate instead," she said.

Lindell chose this moment to make his escape. The newspaperman and his girlfriend didn't try to stop him. He crossed Park Street and climbed carefully into the snow-heaped clearing above the sidewalks, where a few scattered trees stood alongside the monument. It was surprisingly difficult to keep his balance carrying the trash can. Ordinarily, when he felt himself slipping, he would have thrown his arms out as a counterweight, but with the trash can in his hands he had to use his elbows and shoulders instead, jerking them this way and that. He must have looked like a complete fool. When he reached the top of the stairs, he ventured off the walkway into the grass. He could hear the satisfying crunch of fresh snow beneath his feet. The monument, rising above the white field and the black footpaths, looked like a pin stuck through a giant map – which in a way, he supposed, it was.

There were a few dozen other people in the clearing, including a guy who was trying to ride his bicycle through the snow, a couple of bird-watchers, and a ring of those parapsychology fanatics he had been noticing more and more often around the city recently, six deluded nitwits linking their hands together and attempting to beam their thoughts out to Laura Byrd. He managed to avoid them by skirting along the outside row of benches and picnic tables. He broke out through the opposite corner of the park, leaving a dotted line of footprints behind him, along with a dish-shaped circle where he had put the trash can down so that he could adjust his pants.

For the past few weeks he had been conducting long conversations about the end of the world in his head. They were simple discussions that, if he wasn't careful, quickly degenerated into savage arguments and then into swiftly moving imaginary debates in which various people, sometimes judges and prosecuting attorneys, sometimes just disembodied voices, accused him of bearing direct responsibility for the effects of the virus. They insisted that he ought to have done something to halt its spread, or at least to have warned people that it was coming. Why didn't you? they needled him. Why didn't you do anything? But it wasn't his fault. It wasn't. Fuck you. He was just a regular guy who happened to land a public relations gig with Coca-Cola. Public relations was all about generating or occasionally deflecting interest in your particular brand and then channeling that interest down the most appropriate pathway. Generating and deflecting interest: that was all he had done. What thinking person could blame him for it?

It was true that he might have broken his vow and told the press what was going on, announced that the virus was being disseminated by way of his company's product – we're very sorry and all that sort of thing – but what good would it have done? The virus had already spread beyond all its original vectors. Coca-Cola or no Coca-Cola, there was no way of stopping it.

He didn't see how anything he might have done could have changed what happened in the end. And that was what the accusers in his head really wanted from him, wasn't it? They wanted change – a change in the fate of the world – and they wanted him to be the one who brought that change about.

Well, it was too much to ask. They could all go to hell.

"You can all go to hell." He said it out loud.

He was going down an open set of stairs, on a side street that had been used so rarely since the weather changed that the individual steps were almost impossible to distinguish beneath the snow. He held the trash can in one arm and used the other to steady himself, stomping and sliding his way to the bottom. Then he cut through an alley between two high buildings and turned right onto what he could tell had once been a major avenue. He took the sidewalk past an automotive supply shop and a toy store and a real estate office, then past a newspaper kiosk, and then past a whole foods store and a coffee bar, all of them abandoned in the days following the evacuation. The farther he moved from the center of the monument district, the fewer people he saw. The snow seemed to be getting deeper and deeper.