The air carried a slight odor of ammonia that became much stronger above the grate in the center of the floor. It was the kind of smell that must have been like poison to a wasp—or to this one, at least, which steered carefully away from it. Whenever the wasp plunged toward her, Laura would retreat to the grate, and it would swerve aside.
Eventually, after what must have been dozens of paper towels, the wasp found the doorway of the building as if by accident. Suddenly it was gone.
The buzzing noise was pinched out by the breeze as it disappeared into the branches.
Laura sank against the wall, her face covered with sweat. “You can come out now,” she said.
The door made Minny’s voice sound unusually quiet. “Are you talking to him or me?”
“To you.”
Minny shut the door. She walked over to Laura and leaned up against her, resting her arm on her shoulder. “That took just about forever,” she said.
All these years later and Laura still remembered her answer: “Not forever, but long enough.”
~
Which would make a wonderful epitaph, she now thought.
She was a world and a half away from the fortress, a world and a half away from everyone and everywhere she had ever been. The tent was impossibly cold. Tiny teardrop-shaped pendants of ice fell onto her chest and stomach as she shivered, and she had to brush them off before they melted against the heat of her skin. She could hear something rattling and cracking whenever she moved—either the sleeping bag or her own body. She was too tired, frankly, to tell the difference.
She knew that she had slept at least sporadically, because she could remember dreaming, and a person didn’t dream unless she slept, did she? But she was so tired and so cold that the membrane separating her waking life from her sleeping life had become porous. Each side had begun to leak into the other. She found it increasingly hard to differentiate between the two.
She had dreamed that she was in her office at the Coca-Cola complex, for instance, watching a ribbon of sunlight slant across the floor, which meant that it must have been late afternoon, sometime in the spring. So why was she so cold, she wondered, and what was she doing in her sleeping bag? She wasn’t supposed to sleep at work. It was the kind of thing that could get her fired. Maybe she was sick, she thought. Maybe she had been sent to the nurse’s office at her high school, where the mattress crackled beneath her, gradually filling with ice. There was so much ice that the sheets crystallized in overlapping scales. She imagined that her mother was feeding her raisins as she lay in bed with a cold, dropping them one by one through the long straw that curved and dipped like a snake on its way to her mouth. “Open the tunnel,” her mother said. “Here comes the train. Chooga-chooga-chooga-chooga—woo, wooo!” But the raisins were alive, and not actually raisins at all. Laura wasn’t quite sure what they were. It was obvious, though, that they didn’t want to fall. They put out dozens of black pincered legs to slow their descent. Thank God for the harness and the rope, she thought. The walls of the crevasse were so slippery, so steep. Who knew how deep it went? And the tent was like a hot-air balloon, barely tethered to the ground. She knew that she had to feed herself if she was ever going to get well again. She had to exercise and take better care of her body. That was what her mother had told her. Oat bran. Green vegetables. Bicycles. She dreamed that she was exercising on the treadmill at her gym, and then she felt something bulbous and hard shaking around in the bottoms of her shoes, and when she took them off and overturned them, her toes fell out like so many pebbles. And she woke up, and she was not surprised.
She had long since lost all feeling in her extremities. Even the nerves of her teeth had been killed by the frost. She would never have known she was clenching them together at all if it weren’t for the spikes of tenderness she felt in her gums, thin needles of pain inside a surrounding aura of pressure. When she finally summoned up the resolve to check herself for frostbite, shortly after she returned from picking through the remnants of the hut, she discovered that the toes of her left foot were nothing more than ugly gray-black knots, beyond all promise of recovery. So were the fourth and fifth toes of her right foot. The tips of her fingers were in bad shape, too—terrible shape, really—along with her right cheek and the whole of her left ear. But she was able to treat them with a hemodynamic salve and bandages, and she had some small hope that they would get better in time.
How she would begin her trek back to the shelter, though, she couldn’t imagine. She would never be able to make it over the shelf without help. And where on earth would help come from? The radio was broken, the sledge was broken, the entire world had been emptied out.
In addition to which she had taken no care to provide a return route for herself.
It was something of a miracle that she had made it as far as the cove in the first place. She wasn’t sure she could find her way back onto the ice through the maze of cracks and pressure ridges that surrounded the rookery, much less to the far side of Ross Island. Hell, she was barely even able to find her way out of the tent at night. She would climb out of her sleeping bag sometimes in a high fever and grope for the opening as though she had never used her hands in her life.
Who was she? she thought. She was nobody special. When she died, there would be no one to remember her. The simple truth was that her strength—or whatever combination of muscle, luck, and willpower had driven her from the hut to the shelter and from the shelter onto the open ice and across the bay—was gone. Played out. Finished.
Finished. Finnish. Danish. Swedish. Meatball.
She gave a tiny, puffing laugh, but the effort hurt her stomach.
She could hear the emperors trumpeting beneath the barrier wall. The last time she went outside, to stake down a loose corner of the tent, they had been huddled together with their backs to the wind. Most of them were carrying eggs on the flaps of their feet, gripping them beneath the soft rounded bald patches on the undersides of their guts, which insulated the eggs from the cold. The ones that didn’t have eggs were balancing egg-sized lumps of ice there, dead little worlds that they protected as avidly as though they were real. She had read about this behavior before, how the penguins were so desperate to incubate their young that they would seize on anything that even slightly resembled an egg. Stones, ice chunks, masses of snow—it didn’t matter. Every so often one of the penguins nursing an actual egg would let go of it in order to dive beneath the water for food, and the others would drop their pieces of rock and ice and squabble over it until one of them had succeeded in tucking it under its gut. They always preferred the real eggs to the fake ones, which suggested that they were merely using the fake eggs as comfort devices, the way that mothers whose children have died will clutch the pillows they slept on or the stuffed animals they ported around with them, holding them to their faces and breasts in order to remember what it was like when they were alive.
Once, though, a behavioral scientist had placed a polished plastic canteen next to the penguins, a fluorescent orange sphere he filled with instant coffee, and they had abandoned their eggs—all of them, and all at once—to fight over it. They must have thought it was the most beautiful egg they had ever seen, the scientist speculated in his journal. The egg they realized they had always been waiting for. The egg of the future.
The rusty sound of the penguins’ voices stopped suddenly, crested again, then slowly died away. Laura listened to the slapping of their wings as she lay shivering in the tent. She was hungry, or at least she knew she ought to be, but she couldn’t steel herself to break out of her sleeping bag. The ice had frozen around the opening in a thick collar, and it would be a terrible struggle for her to push her way through.
If she didn’t freeze to death, she was almost certainly going to starve to death, and she knew it.
Laura Byrd, the inscription would read, followed by the date she was born and the date she had died. Laura Byrd. Not forever, but long enough.
Filaments of frost and snow crossed the
floor of the tent, blown into straight lines by the draft. Most of it had been swept inside when she opened the flap, but some of it was simply the accumulation of her own breath, which froze into a white powder as soon as it touched the air, settling on the floor in a long plume.
White powder. The Coca-Cola Corporation had initiated what they called their “white powder” campaign just a month or so before Laura left for Antarctica. The campaign had followed on the heels of the last big germ scare, during which a few thousand people around the country, mostly in small houses scattered along grayed-out highways, had found packages filled with the pale, almost colorless powders of smallpox, anthrax, and scarlet fever on their doorsteps. The deliveries had stopped after only a week, as suddenly as they had started, with no one imprisoned or apprehended. But soon after, people in their millions began receiving stiff cardboard envelopes in the mail that spilled a grainy white powder onto their hands when they opened them. Police departments, hospitals, and emergency warning centers were inundated with phone calls. Thousands of city and county governments activated their terrorism-alert beacons. The powder was quickly revealed to be a harmless laundry detergent with a coupon nested inside, which read, “Clean Up with the Coca-Cola Sweepstakes. Buy One Two-Liter Bottle, Get a Second One Free.”
The corporation had been chastised for the recklessness of the sweepstakes by both Houses of Congress and the editorial pages of several hundred newspapers. They had released a statement apologizing for any disruption the campaign might have caused, and they had assured the public that such results were entirely unintentional. But sales of two-liter Coke bottles tripled in the weeks following the incident, and sales of all other Coca-Cola products doubled.
Guerrilla publicity, they called it.
Laura must have fallen asleep again, because when she opened her eyes she realized she was not listening to a discussion about the white powder campaign at all. She was not in the conference room that adjoined her office or anywhere inside the Coca-Cola complex. She was still lying in her tent. The glaze of ice had melted from around her eyes while she was sleeping, and the light was brighter than it had been in months. She could see everything with a remarkable clarity. The silver pan of the Primus stove, crusted over with a light brown syrup. The fanlike patterns of frost on the walls. The double row of black stitches marching over the dome of the tent like a procession of ants. There was a half-eaten bar of pemmican in the corner, notched with the impressions of her teeth, and an unopened bag of granola beside it. A popcorn-shaped knot of ice had formed around the zipper of her sleeping bag.
She was taken aback not only by how much she could see, but by how much she could hear. It had never occurred to her that the light could improve her hearing as well as her vision, and yet undeniably it had. A penguin, for instance, was snapping delicately at its feathers. The fabric of the tent was booming in the wind. A vast tide of krill went swimming past beneath the ice.
Even her heartbeat was clear to her, regular and strong, as though she were holding her breath somewhere deep under water. The more closely she listened to it, the louder it seemed to become, until she could feel it keeping time throughout her body.
It was everywhere—in her toes, her stomach, even the tips of her ears. Amazing.
She shut her eyes and listened. Something unusual was happening to her. She was stretched around her heart, taut and firm like the skin of a drum, a perfectly sealed membrane that was beating, beating, beating. The heat of her blood was moving through her in millions of waves, more than she could possibly contain, and yet somehow she did contain them. She couldn’t understand how she had become so big. She was as large as a forest, as large as a city. Her heart was the size of a lake, and she was swimming in it. She couldn’t hear anything else. The sound filled her until she shook, and then it filled the tent, and then it filled the world.
THIRTEEN.
THE HEARTBEAT
Once again Minny couldn’t sleep. How many nights had she lain in bed beside Luka, barely touching his back with the side of her arm as she waited for the darkness to pull her under? Not every night, but often enough. She had tried all the various remedies people suggested—melatonin, red wine, exercise, chamomile tea—but none of them seemed to work. They made her body drowsy, but not her mind. And her mind, let’s face it, was the problem. Her mind was a roulette wheel, rattling and spinning in endless circles, and there she was standing beside it, watching the bright silver ball of her consciousness as it bounced first one way and then another.
That was what insomnia was, after all—an excess of consciousness, an excess of life. Ever since she could remember, she had treated her life as an act of will, the you-can-do-anything-you-set-your-mind-to philosophy, but she couldn’t will herself to fall asleep. The only way to fall asleep was not to care whether you fell asleep or not: you had to relinquish your will. Most people seemed to think that you fell asleep and then started dreaming, but as far as Minny could tell, the process was exactly the reverse—you started dreaming and that enabled you to fall asleep. She wasn’t able to start dreaming, though, because she couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she wasn’t already asleep. And anything that called her attention to that fact made it more likely that she would keep thinking about it, and a million little snowdrops of nervous tension would bud open inside her, and thus she wouldn’t start dreaming, and thus she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
What a mess.
She listened to Luka breathing in the slow rhythm of his own sleep. She had heard the sound so many times that she could have identified it in a police lineup. Listen carefully, ma’am. Take your time. Is this the sound of the man you’re looking for? “Yes, that’s him, officer. He says he loves me, but I don’t know why.”
Which was exactly what he himself had said the last time she pressed him for a reason: “I love you, but I don’t know why. I just do. Shouldn’t that be enough?”
And it should have been, but the question kept needling at her.
One, two, three—sleep, she said to herself, but of course it didn’t work.
This restlessness of hers, the way her mind kept turning over on itself as she lay in bed—it was kind of like the city, wasn’t it? The entire population was suffering from an excess of consciousness, an excess of life. That was her diagnosis. They were passing out their days in a place somewhere between life and death, in that drifting stage after the lights went out but before sleep came over them.
A city of people who were waiting to dream.
A city of insomniacs.
She moved her feet in slow, overlapping circles, a nervous gesture she had picked up around the time her parents divorced, when she was fifteen years old and just beginning high school. The friction warmed her feet, which were always a bit cold. She found the repetitive swaying motion comforting. Her mother used to pass by her bedroom and see her rocking back and forth beneath the blankets and shut the door, chastising her, “If you can’t respect the other people living in this household, at least have some respect for your own body, dear,” which always made Minny laugh. She loved her mother and still saw her once or twice a week. Every so often, she even caught sight of her father, eating in some cafeteria or moving around on the far side of a crowd, maybe balancing a pack of playing cards on the rim of a glass in the back room of a bar. He always greeted her with the same look of surprise mingled with terror, then fled before she could say anything to him. Shortly after the divorce, he had put a gun to his chest and committed suicide. He must have imagined that he was escaping from everything he had ever known. Certainly he had never expected to see his daughter again.
She didn’t blame him for running away.
She understood that she was better off than any number of other people in the city. Take Luka, for instance, who hadn’t seen either of his parents since he had died, or at least since she had met him—just the two or three neighbors he had known and the handful of students he had taught during the one short summer he had spent with Laura.
Minny heard him mumble something in his sleep, and she turned over onto her other side. Her ear was resting on the palm of her hand, which was wedged between her head and the pillow. For a moment she thought she heard someone knocking on the door. Then she realized it was only the sound of her heart beating. And then she realized that it couldn’t be the sound of her heart beating.
She had never been one of those people who went around the city with an invisible heart keeping time in her ears. She had always assumed that such people were undergoing some sort of mass hallucination. They had fixed their minds on something they either wished for or remembered (Luka would have teased the pun out: something they had learned by heart). And then, abracadabra, they imagined it was actually there.
But the beating she heard was unmistakable. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
She lay there listening to the sound for what must have been hours, and when finally she opened her eyes again, the light had risen outside her window and it was just as unmistakably morning.
~
The heartbeat did not go away. Several days passed and still Minny could not stop listening to it.
As it turned out, she wasn’t alone. No one in the city failed to notice it. It seemed to fill the air like a soft rain of ashes—so abundant that it revealed the smallest motions of the wind, yet so light that it barely tingled as it touched their skin. Everywhere she went, Minny saw people reflexively putting their hands to their chests as they waited alone in the lobbies of movie theaters or sat talking to one another in crowded restaurants. She knew that they were feeling for that old familiar rhythm.
Luka wrote about the phenomenon one day in the Sims Sheet. He headlined the article, HEART BEATS, PEOPLE LISTEN. It was a man-on-the-street piece, profiling some half dozen people he had confronted with a pair of questions on the subject: What did the heartbeat mean? And, Where did it come from? As usual there was no consensus of opinion. A man who identified himself as Martin Campbell said that the pattern of the heartbeat was familiar to him, but he couldn’t figure out where he remembered it from. He was only sure that it made him want to go to sleep. A woman named Linda Terrell said, “Don’t you know? There’s a giant heart buried beneath the subways. Take your shoes off. You can feel it beating in your toes.” One man claimed that the heartbeat was his own, though he would not explain how he knew this to be the case.