Chapter One
THE CITY
When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had
traveled across a desert of living sand. First he had died, he said,
and then-snap!-the desert. He told the story to everyone who would
listen, bobbing his head to follow the sound of their footsteps.
Showers of red grit fell from his beard. He said that the desert was
bare and lonesome and that it had hissed at him like a snake. He had
walked for days and days, until the dunes broke apart beneath his
feet, surging up around him to lash at his face. Then everything
went still and began to beat like a heart. The sound was as clear as
any he had ever heard. It was only at that moment, he said, with a
million arrow points of sand striking his skin, that he truly
realized he was dead.
Jim Singer, who managed the sandwich shop in the monument district,
said that he had felt a prickling sensation in his fingers and then
stopped breathing. “It was my heart,” he insisted, thumping firmly
on his chest. “Took me in my own bed.” He had closed his eyes, and
when he opened them again, he was on a train, the kind that trolleys
small children around in circles at amusement parks. The rails were
leading him through a thick forest of gold-brown trees, but the
trees were actually giraffes, and their long necks were reaching
like branches into the sky. A wind rose up and peeled the spots from
their backs. The spots floated down around him, swirling and dipping
in the wake of the train. It took him a long time to understand that
the throbbing noise he heard was not the rattling of the wheels
along the tracks.
The girl who liked to stand beneath the poplar tree in the park said
that she had died into an ocean the color of dried cherries. For a
while the water had carried her weight, she said, and she had lain
on her back turning in meaningless circles, singing the choruses of
the pop songs she remembered. But then there was a drum of thunder,
and the clouds split open, and the ball bearings began to pelt down
around her-tens of thousands of them. She had swallowed as many as
she could, she said, stroking the cracked trunk of the poplar tree.
She didn’t know why. She filled like a canvas sack and sank slowly
through the layers of the ocean. Shoals of fish brushed past her,
their blue and yellow scales the single brightest thing in the
water. And all around her she heard that sound, the one that
everybody heard, the regular pulsing of a giant heart.
The stories people told about the crossing were as varied and
elaborate as their ten billion lives, so much more particular than
those other stories, the ones they told about their deaths. After
all, there were only so many ways a person could die: either your
heart took you, or your head took you, or it was one of the new
diseases. But no one followed the same path over the crossing. Lev
Paley said that he had watched his atoms break apart like marbles,
roll across the universe, then gather themselves together again out
of nothing at all. Hanbing Li said that he woke inside the body of
an aphid and lived an entire life in the flesh of a single peach.
Graciella Cavazos would say only that she began to snow-four
words-and smile bashfully whenever anyone pressed her for details.
No two reports were ever the same. And yet always there was the
drumlike thumping noise.
Some people insisted that it never went away, that if you
concentrated and did not turn your ear from the sound, you could
hear it faintly behind everything in the city-the brakes and the
horns, the bells on the doors of restaurants, the clicking and
slapping of different kinds of shoes on the pavement. Groups of
people came together in parks or on rooftops just to listen for it,
sitting quietly with their backs turned to one another. Ba-dum.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. It was like trying to keep a bird in sight as it
lifted, blurred, and faded to a dot in the sky.
Luka Sims had found an old mimeograph machine his very first week in
the city and decided to use it to produce a newspaper. He stood
outside the River Road Coffee Shop every morning, handing out the
circulars he had printed. One particular issue of the L. Sims News &
Speculation Sheet-or the Sims Sheet, as people called it-addressed
the matter of this sound. Fewer than twenty percent of the people
Luka interviewed claimed that they could still hear it after the
crossing, but almost everyone agreed that it resembled nothing so
much as-could be nothing other than-the pounding of a heart. The
question, then, was, Where did it come from? It could not be their
own hearts, for their hearts no longer beat. The old man Mahmoud
Qassim believed that it was not the actual sound of his heart, but
the remembered sound, which, because he had both heard and failed to
notice it for so long, still resounded in his ears. The woman who
sold bracelets by the river thought that it was the heartbeat at the
center of the world, that bright, boiling place she had fallen
through on her way to the city. “As for this reporter,” the article
concluded, “I hold with the majority. I have always suspected that
the thumping sound we hear is the pulse of those who are still
alive. The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only
so long as they remember us.” It was an imperfect metaphor-Luka knew
that-since the pearl lasts much longer than the oyster. But rule one
in the newspaper business was that you had to meet your deadlines.
He had long since given up the quest for perfection.
There were more people in the city every day, and yet the city never
failed to accommodate them. You might be walking down a street you
had known for years, and all of a sudden you would come upon another
building, another whole block. Carson McCaughrean, who drove one of
the sleek black taxis that roamed the streets, had to redraw his
maps once a week. Twenty, thirty, fifty times a day, he would pick
up a fare who had only recently arrived in the city and have to
deliver him somewhere he-Carson-had never heard of. They came from
Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. They came from churning
metropolises and from small islands in the middle of the ocean. That
was what the living did: they died. There was an ancient street
musician who began playing in the red brick district as soon as he
reached the city, making slow, sad breaths with his accordion. There
was a jeweler, a young man, who set up shop at the corner of Maple
and Christopher Streets and sold diamonds that he mounted on silver
pendants. Jessica Auffert had operated her own jewelry shop on the
same corner for more than thirty years, but she did not seem to
resent the man, and in fact brought him a mug of fresh black coffee
every morning, exchanging gossip as she drank with him in his front
room. What surprised her was how young he was-how young so many of
the dead were these days. Great numbers of them were no more than
children, who clattered around on skateboards or went racing past
her window on their way to the playground. One, a boy with a
strawberry discoloration on his cheek, liked to pretend that the
rocking horses he tossed himself around on were real horses, the
horses he had brushed and fed on his farm before they were killed in
the bombing. Another liked to swoop down the slide over and over
again, hammering his feet into the gravel as he thought about his
parents and his two older brothers, who were still alive. He had
watched them lift free of the same illness that had slowly sucked
him under. He did not like to talk about it.
This was during a war, though it was difficult for any of them to
remember which one.
* * *
Occasionally one of the dead, someone who had just completed the
crossing, would mistake the city for heaven. It was a
misunderstanding that never persisted for long. What kind of heaven
had the blasting sound of garbage trucks in the morning, and chewing
gum on the pavement, and the smell of fish rotting by the river?
What kind of hell, for that matter, had bakeries and dogwood trees
and perfect blue days that made the hairs on the back of your neck
rise on end? No, the city was not heaven, and it was not hell, and
it certainly was not the world. It stood to reason, then, that it
had to be something else. More and more people came to adopt the
theory that it was an extension of life itself-a sort of outer
room-and that they would remain there only so long as they endured
in living memory. When the last person who had actually known them
died, they would pass over into whatever came next. It was true that
most of the city’s occupants went away after sixty or seventy years,
and while this did not prove the theory, it certainly served to
nourish it. There were stories of men and women who had been in the
city much longer, for centuries and more, but there were always such
stories, in every time and place, and who knew whether to believe
them?
Every neighborhood had its gathering spot, a place where people
could come together to trade news of the other world. There was the
colonnade in the monument district, and the One and Only Tavern in
the warehouse district, and right next to the greenhouse, in the
center of the conservatory district, was Andrei Kalatozov’s Russian
Tea Room. Kalatozov poured the tea he brewed from a brass samovar
into small porcelain cups that he served on polished wooden
platters. His wife and daughter had died a few weeks before he did,
in an accident involving a land mine they had rooted up out of the
family garden. He was watching through the kitchen window when it
happened. His wife’s spade struck a jagged hunk of metal, so
cankered with rust from its century underground that he did not
realize what it was until it exploded. Two weeks later, when he put
the razor to his throat, it was with the hope that he would be
reunited with his family in heaven. And, sure enough, there they
were-his wife and daughter-smiling and taking coats at the door of
the tea room. Kalatozov watched them as he sliced a lemon into
wedges and arranged the wedges on a saucer. He was the happiest man
in the room-the happiest man in any room. The city may not have been
heaven, but it was heaven enough for him. Morning to evening, he
listened to his customers as they shared the latest news about the
war. The Americans and the Middle East had resumed hostilities, as
had China and Spain and Australia and the Netherlands. Brazil was
developing another mutagenic virus, one that would resist the latest
antitoxins. Or maybe it was Italy. Or maybe Indonesia. There were so
many rumors that it was hard to know for sure.
Now and then someone who had died only a day or two before would
happen into one of the centers of communication-the tavern or the
tea room, the river market or the colonnade-and the legions of the
dead would mass around him, shouldering and jostling him for
information. It was always the same: “Where did you live?” “Do you
know anything about Central America?” “Is it true what they’re
saying about the ice caps?” “I’m trying to find out about my cousin.
He lived in Arizona. His name was Lewis Zeigler, spelled L-e-w-i-s …”
“What’s happening with the situation along the African coast-do you
know, do you know?” “Anything you can tell us, please, anything at
all.”
Kiran Patel had sold beads to tourists in the Bombay hotel district
for most of a century. She said that there were fewer and fewer
travelers to her part of the world, but that this hardly mattered,
since there was less and less of her part of the world for them to
see. The ivory beads she had peddled as a young woman had become
scarce, then rare, then finally unobtainable. The only remaining
elephants were caged away in the zoos of other countries. In the
years just before she died, the “genuine ivory beads” she sold were
actually a cream-colored plastic made in batches of ten thousand in
Korean factories. This, too, hardly mattered. The tourists who
stopped at her kiosk could never detect the difference.
Jeffrey Fallon, sixteen and from Park Falls, Wisconsin, said that
the fighting hadn’t spread in from the coasts yet, but that the
germs had, and he was living proof. “Or not living, maybe, but still
proof,” he corrected himself. The bad guys used to be Pakistan, and
then they were Argentina and Turkey, and after that he had lost
track. “What do you want me to tell you?” he asked, shrugging his
shoulders. “Mostly I just miss my girlfriend.” Her name was Tracey
Tipton, and she did this thing with his earlobes and the notched
edge of her front teeth that made his entire body go taut and buzz
like a guitar string. He had never given his earlobes a second
thought until the day she took them between her lips, but now that
he was dead he thought of nothing else. Who would have figured?
The man who spent hours riding up and down the escalators in the
Ginza Street Shopping Mall would not give his name. When people
asked him what he remembered about the time before he died, he would
only nod vigorously, clap his hands together, and say, “Boom!,”
making a gesture like falling confetti with his fingertips.
(Continues…)
Pantheon
Copyright © 2006
Kevin Brockmeier
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-375-42423-7
Excerpted from The Brief History of the Dead
by Kevin Brockmeier
Copyright © 2006 by Kevin Brockmeier.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
