The Brief History of the Dead (27 page)

“But who’s to say we haven’t been
re
embodied?”

“I’m to say it. Me. Right here.”

There was a flaw at the heart of their discussion, the blind man realized. They were mistaking the spirit for the soul. Many people tended to use the words casually, interchangeably, as though there was no difference at all between them, but the spirit and the soul were not the same thing. The body was the material component of a person. The soul was the nonmaterial component. The spirit was simply the connecting line.

This was what his father, a pastor at the First Church of God in Christ, had taught him when he was a boy, and though the blind man had long since ceased to believe in God, or at least in the teachings of the First Church of God in Christ, the distinction remained meaningful to him. When you died, the connecting line of the spirit snapped, and what remained of you was simply the body on one side—a heap of clay and minerals—and the soul on the other. The spirit was nothing more than a function of their interaction, like the ripples that formed where the wind blew over the water. If you took away the wind, and you took away the water, the ripples would vanish. And if they didn’t vanish? Well, if they didn’t—and this was just speculation on the blind man’s part—then you got what people called a ghost. A ghost was what became of a spirit when it lingered past its time. It was the ripple without the wind and the water, the connecting line separated from the body and the soul. But the blind man was not a ghost. He knew that much.

He thought about approaching the table where the two men were discussing the issue and interrupting them with, “Gentlemen, I may be a body, and I may be a soul, but I’m certainly no spirit.” Their conversation had already moved on, though, and they were arguing about something else now.

He heard a chair scraping across the floor, someone grinding pepper with a pepper mill, a woman laughing and slapping her table with an open palm.

Somewhere a bell was ringing.

Fat sizzled on a grill.

The birds sounded closer than ever.

The blind man turned his attention back to the street and walked on. That night he fell asleep sitting on a tall stool beside his kitchen counter. When he woke up the next morning and felt the cool layer of Formica under his forehead and the still air around his shoulders, it took him a moment to remember where he was. Instinctively he reached out for his leather satchel, the one in which he had carried his keys and his extra shoes and identification papers for so many years when he was alive. But of course it wasn’t there. It was one of the many things he had lost in the desert, along with his eyeglasses and the better part of his wits. Most of the time he barely missed them.

The wind was not blowing, but something must have shaken the tree outside his window, because he could hear the budded end of a dogwood twig tapping delicately against the glass. It had the soft, clear, cadenced sound of a walking cane striking the ground, and he thought of the last time he himself had used such a cane, an entire lifetime of years ago. It was shortly after the day Mary Elizabeth dropped the coin into his thermos cap, when he was eight or nine years old. His school bus had just dropped him off at the corner of the block when he heard a few of the older boys in his neighborhood approaching him from across the crisped grass of someone’s lawn. “Why are you blind?” they asked him. “Hey, you, why are you
blind
?”

He never knew quite what to say to this question. It seemed obvious that the boys were teasing him again, but there was always the chance that they were genuinely curious, that they honestly wanted to know for once, and he hated to imagine himself hurting their feelings. Why would they keep asking him if they didn’t really care? he wondered. They wouldn’t, would they? What would be the point?

He decided to try answering them. “My mama says it happened right after I was born. I was an incubator baby, and they gave me too much oxygen.”

This made the boys laugh for some reason, and so he guessed that they had not been curious, after all. They repeated the word “incubator”: “
Incubator
. He says he’s an
incubator
. Even as a
baby,
dude was an incubator—man, that’s sick.”

Then they fell quiet, and one of the boys asked him, “So how often do you incubate? Once a day? What about in the shower? Do you incubate in the shower?”

He was confused. “Just that one time,” he said. This set off a second round of laughter and jostling. Soon the boys were jostling him, as well, and though he wasn’t sure, he thought that they might be coaxing him to join in with the fun—to laugh along with the joke, whatever it was. He gave a tiny experimental chuckle, but it didn’t sound right. It was raspy and low, much deeper than his normal laugh.

All of a sudden he needed to swallow. He allowed the boys’ voices to die out before he told them, “Well, I need to get home now.”

One of them stepped in front of him. “Hey, that’s a great cane you’ve got there. Can I see that cane?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Aw, man.” A shoe scuffed at the asphalt. “Little dude burned me. That’s no way to treat a buddy.”

Another boy said, “Yeah. Come on, kid. Let him see the cane. He’ll give it right back.”

“That’s right. All I want to do is take a look at it.”

And the last boy said, “You don’t want us to think you don’t like us, do you?”

He didn’t believe them at first—why would he?—but then something in his conscience gave itself over to the possibility that they might be telling the truth, as it always did, no matter how often they deceived him, and he knew that he was going to give them the cane. There was a little man who lived inside him, gripping his heart and repeating,
Believe everybody. Never hurt a soul. Believe everybody. Never hurt a soul,
and though sometimes he tried to shut his ears to the man, in the end he could never help but listen to him.
“Do you promise you’ll give it right back?” he asked the boys.

“Cross my heart, hope to die.”

“Well, okay, then.”

As soon as he held the cane out, one of them yanked it out of his grip. “I like this cane,” he said, and another whistled, “Man, that cane makes you look bad
ass,
” and the third said, “A cane fit for a pimp,” to which the first one answered, “I know. I think I just might have to keep this cane for myself,” and he listened to them praising the cane and passing it back and forth for what seemed like forever, until its absence in his hands began to itch at him.

“Okay. Give it back now,” he said. “I need to go home.”

“Hold your horses.”

“What’s your hurry?”

“Yeah, who said it was
your
cane anyway?”

“You guys—” He complained. But they rapped him once over the head with the cane, then a second time across the butt, and when he fell down, they took off running. He heard one of them say,
“Clon-n-n-ng!,”
making his voice vibrate the way the cane had as it struck his skull. Then a door slammed a few houses down the block from him and they were gone.

That was the last he saw of his cane. He had never gotten another one.

When he heard the same boys talking in the cul-de-sac a few days later, they insisted that they had never met him before, and he couldn’t seem to convince them otherwise. “Cane?” they said. “I don’t know anything about a cane. Maybe you mean ‘stain.’ Did somebody take your stain? All that incubation will give a man stains. You know what I think? I think you’re just making up stories to impress the chickadees.”

It didn’t take long for him to give up on the idea of getting the cane back from them. Over the next few weeks he learned to walk by the sound of his footsteps, by an outstretched hand and a small measure of intuition. He stored the shape of his own neighborhood in his head, gradually unfolding it like a map at the boundaries. He avoided the older boys whenever he could until, eventually, they grew up, got jobs and got married, or just exhausted themselves and forgot what it had been like when they were children.

This was what he remembered as he sat in his kitchen listening to the dogwood tree tapping against his window.

~

But why did he remember only the things in his life that had hurt him? Why couldn’t he remember the things that had given him joy or caused him to smile: the jokes he had heard, the songs that had made him lift his arms in the air, the people who had loved him, whose cheeks he had touched with his fingers?

There had been a time, and not that long ago, when he had taken pride in the fineness of his memory. He had thought of the history of his life as a perfect unfraying string, spooling out in a single line behind him; all he had to do was take it in his hands, give it a few strong hitches, and he could reexamine it at any point. But now the string had become tangled and knotted, and he was afraid that it would never be straight again.

It was late that afternoon when he heard someone say that the rest of the golf course had disappeared, along with the fire station, the arboretum, and the back half of one of the office buildings on Erndira Street. The next morning it was the natural science museum and most of the shopping plaza. And a couple of days after that, for the first time, a woman reported that the phenomenon had extended its great blank barriers below the ground. The woman said that she had been crossing through the subway tunnel that ran beneath Christopher Street when she paused at the edge of the platform to tie her shoes. She noticed that the tracks and the track bed were no longer there. She backed away, then peered over the edge to look again. Nothing. She found the crushed red and silver disk of a Coke can on the platform and tried to drop it into the empty space. But she must have miscalculated, she said, because it landed at her feet, bounced a few times, then rolled away behind her. “It was like there was a river running between this side of the platform and the other. Except that there was nothing to it. No clay, no water—so basically no river.” She gave a muffled laugh. “I guess I don’t really know how to describe it.”

“You don’t have to describe it,” someone said. “We’ve all seen it for ourselves.”

But the blind man had not seen it. “You’re talking about what’s happening down below,” he said. “That’s one thing. But what about what’s happening up above?”

He heard a half dozen collars rustling as the people around him craned their heads to look into the sky. “It’s hard to tell,” someone answered. “But
something’s
definitely going on up there.”

There was an unusual shearing pattern to the tops of the clouds, apparently, but no one could say whether it was the effect of the bubble or just some strange wind blowing high in the atmosphere. The blind man listened as they talked the matter over. Was the top corner of one of the high-rises missing? Had the sky always been that same powdery shade of blue? Finally, a gravelly voice summed things up for him: “It looks a little washed out, maybe, but everything’s still up there, at least as far as I can tell.”

After that, the crowd began to dissipate. As the blind man was leaving, a finger tapped his shoulder. He smelled a faint whiff of lavender. “How are you doing?” The voice belonged to a woman.

“I’ve seen worse times,” the blind man said.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“I’m Minny Rings. I met you after the evacuation. We made coffee and English muffins together.”

“Did we?”

“Mm-hmm. You and me and Luka Sims. And this makes six to ten.”

Luka Sims? The blind man thought about the name for a moment, and then he remembered. “The newspaperman.”

“That’s right.”

What he remembered about the newspaperman was the quality of his breathing, which had been quick and nervous, reminding him of the pulsing heart of a rabbit he had once held in his lap. Also, there was the astringent smell of ink that rose from his clothing and his irritating habit of trying to take the blind man’s arm whenever it came time for them to cross the street. Nothing else came to him.

Still, he knew that he had liked the newspaperman, though he could not have explained why. “My regards to you both,” he said to the woman.

How long had he been standing there rooting through the tag ends of his memories? It seemed like only a few seconds, but he wasn’t sure. He waited for the woman to answer him, and when she didn’t say anything, he presumed that the conversation was over. He walked home by way of Park Street and M.

When he got back to his apartment, he opened the window and turned his ears to the sound of a flock of birds that were roosting in a nearby tree. The birds whistled and cooed to each other, efficient little one- and two-note songs, until a car with a broken radiator passed beneath them and they gave a chorus of fluttery peeping sounds. A couple of kids dashed by, smacking the tree with their palms, and the birds took to the air with a sudden explosive snap of their wings. How wonderful it must have been, he thought—to run with a body meant for running, to see with eyes meant for seeing, to fly with wings meant for flying. Sometimes he thought that the most joyful sound in the world would be the sound of the birds taking over the city after everyone else was gone.

It was midway through the next day when the blind man’s own building disappeared. He was standing in the colonnade when a man who had spent the last few hours circling the edge of the city stopped to give some of the people around him a report. Another few blocks were gone, he said, and when he listed them off, the blind man recognized the name of his own.

His building had still been there when he left his front door that morning. He was sure of that. How closely behind him had it been extinguished? he wondered.

A group of rollerbladers went skating by. Someone dropped a rubber ball.

There was nothing in his home that he truly needed. He could always find someplace else to sleep the night. But it was disquieting to know that for the moment, at least, he had nowhere else to go.

“Where’s your cane, little man?” his mother had asked him the day the boys on his block took it away from him. And he had answered her, “I don’t need it anymore.”