Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

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.