The Brief History of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    She was making a minor repair to the stove one morning when she nearly chopped off her left hand. It happened like this: She heard a bolt rattling above the burner, and when she couldn’t get the leverage she needed to tighten it, she climbed on top of the stove, trying for a different angle. She could see straight down the crevice in back. A metal tailing of some kind had come loose from the wall. It was trembling and jerking, brushing against the stove as the wind shook the cabin. That was where the noise was coming from; it wasn’t the bolt at all. She knew the noise would drive her crazy if she let it continue, and so she tried to twist the tailing back into place with her fingers. When that didn’t work, she tried to saw it off with her pocket knife. And when
that
didn’t work, she decided to hack it loose with a hatchet she found in the tool chest. She steadied herself against the stove with her left hand, brought the hatchet up with her right, and just before she reversed her swing, she lost her grip.
    Her hand was so numb from the cold that she didn’t even realize it was empty until the ax came tilting past her head and crashed into the top of the stove. It made a bell-like rolling noise and then clattered to the floor.
    When she looked down, she saw a silvery gash in the stove, curling down into itself like a coring of frozen soil. The gash was right at the tip of her fingers—she might have been pointing to it. That was the moment when she realized how truly alone she was. If the hatchet had fallen just an inch or two to the left, she would have bled to death before anyone found her—weeks or, she was prepared to imagine, even years later. She would have to be more careful from now on.
    She began to remember certain incidents from her life—meetings,