“Whatever the answer,” the article concluded, “this reporter refuses to believe that the sudden rise or recurrence of the sound is insignificant—though what its significance may be I leave it for you, the reader, to judge.”
One thing was certain, and that was that everyone in the city was interested in the topic. For the first time since Minny had met Luka, they handed out every single copy of the paper that morning and found only a few of them balled up in the trash cans as they left.
Afterward, before they went home, they decided to share a late breakfast at Bristow’s. The restaurant was full, and Minny left Luka standing in the lobby while she went to the restroom. When she came back, he was talking to a woman about the condition of the roads.
“I would say I’ve seen at least one traffic accident a day ever since the ice started falling,” the woman told him. “Why, just on the way over here, I watched someone run smack into the side of a mailbox. That crumpling sound! Have you ever been in a car accident?”
He had, of course. The night they met, when they believed they were the only people in the city—the two of them and the blind man, that is—he had told Minny the story of how he had died in a highway accident. He said that he had lost control of the wheel and felt himself being jarred loose from his body. She had never forgotten the tingle that ran over her skin as he described it. But he answered the woman with, “Never. I guess I’ve been pretty lucky.”
“See, for me it’s been one accident after another,” the woman said. “One time my accelerator went out, and I could only get my car to drive in reverse. I literally can’t tell you how many traffic citations I’ve gotten. And then I rear-ended somebody once just trying to see how fast I would have to go to get a grasshopper to blow off my windshield. You know how sometimes you’ve got these questions in your head? Well, the police officer was sympathetic, but he said he had to give me a ticket anyway.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Luka said.
A table emptied out, and they left the woman waiting at the door. Bristow, the owner of the restaurant, showed them to their chairs and filled their water glasses. After they had placed their order, Minny asked Luka, “Why didn’t you tell her about the accident?”
He stirred the ice in his glass. “She’s a complete stranger, and mostly crazy would be my guess. I died, remember? That car accident was one of the three most important things that ever happened to me—probably a close second, right after my birth. I’m not going to tell just anybody about it.”
“But you told me about it the same day we met. And I was a complete stranger.”
“You were a complete stranger,” he agreed. “And you’re also mostly crazy. But you were never just anybody.”
This was the kind of thing he would say every so often, a tight little knot of sentences, like the coil of rubber at the center of a golf ball, that would burst open in a spray of contradictory implications as soon as she tried to pick it apart. What did he mean? Did he have something serious in mind? Or was he just being cryptic for the sake of being cryptic, clever for the sake of being clever? She could never tell. He himself seemed to see such conversations as a kind of affectionate game. Sometimes she would try to play along with him, but she was not very good at it, and they both knew it. She felt clumsy, thick-witted. Usually, instead of joining in with him, she would try to come up with a topic that would shift the mood of the conversation onto a slower, steadier course, one she was sure she could follow. A walk instead of a dance, was how she thought of it. This was just one of the many reasons she couldn’t stop asking him why he loved her.
“Or how’s this?” he amended his answer. “You were a stranger, but you were never complete.” He laughed.
“Did I tell you I saw the blind man yesterday?”
It had the effect she wanted: his smile sank back into his face, and his eyes took on a look of simple curiosity. “No, you didn’t. Where was he?”
“He was having an argument with a ticket vendor. I stopped and asked him if he was all right, and he said he was tired of remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember. Those were his exact words: ‘remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember.’ I think I might have been on the forgetting-everything-he-wanted-to-remember end of the spectrum. When I told him who I was, he said he was pleased to meet me.”
“Yeah, he didn’t remember me the last time, either. So that makes—what?—six for me and eight for you?”
“Nine for me, thank you very much.”
“Nine it is.”
The blind man had disappeared back into his solitude soon after they found their way to the monument district, and ever since then, they had seen him only in passing. They had made a bet that the first one to spot him ten times would win an unspecified favor from the other, collectible at any time. The blind man was something of a hermit, though, or at least he took a different set of streets than they usually did, and weeks would sometimes pass between one sighting and the next. Minny wasn’t surprised that he didn’t remember her. When she thought about those first few days with Luka, before they had heard the gunshots, it was tempting for her to imagine that the blind man had never been there at all. Luka had been the Adam to her Eve, the Friday to her Robinson Crusoe, the Master to her Margarita. None of them were stories that left room for anyone else.
On the other side of the restaurant, Minny saw Laura’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Byrd, eating a breakfast of what looked like scrambled eggs and toast. Mrs. Byrd was using her left hand, Mr. Byrd his right. Their other hands were concealed behind a salt and pepper caddy on the back side of the table, where they could lace their fingers together without anybody watching. They looked like two embarrassed teenagers on a first date. And, simultaneously, they looked like an old couple who had been holding hands so long that they no longer distinguished between the times when they were touching and the times when they weren’t. It was sweet.
Minny had seen the two of them again and again since she had arrived in the city, had even waved to them every so often, but never once had they recognized her. This was understandable. After all, she had certainly changed a whole lot more in the years since she and Laura had been best friends than they had.
When she stopped to consider it, she realized that she probably hadn’t thought about Laura more than fifteen or twenty times during the whole of her adult life. She had never been the kind of person who was haunted by memories of her past, or at least she hadn’t been that kind of person before the virus and the news coverage and the sight of all those bodies propped up in the swaying green grass. But then she had died, and she had found out about Laura’s fling with Luka, and all of a sudden she was thinking about her all the time. There wasn’t much for her to remember, just a few stray images of the two of them playing house and pretending to walk a tightrope and then something about a butterfly and a fortress.
The man she was in love with and her best friend from—what?—third grade?
It was all too strange.
After they had finished eating and took care of the check, they gave up their table to a man in hiking boots and a business suit. It was snowing again, and Minny slipped her hands inside her pockets as they stepped out into the cold.
Luka hooked his arm around her waist and pulled her close to him as they crossed the street, his hand under the tail of her jacket. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Mm-hmm.”
“You seemed a little quiet back there for a while.”
“I know. I was just thinking.”
“About what?”
“About you. About Laura.”
Luka put his fingertips on the hip of her dress, by which he meant to say, You shouldn’t worry so much. Though what he actually said was “Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Trouble.”
“I don’t love trouble,” Minny sniffed.
“‘Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Suffering,’ then.”
“I don’t lov
e suffering, either.”
“Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Coffee.”
She bumped him with her shoulder, playfully. “I can’t argue with that, I guess.”
There were places where the snow had risen so far toward the roofs of the parked cars that they stretched down the side of the road in a series of identical, oddly shaped lumps, like the knots of someone’s spine. The sidewalks were slippery with ice. Maybe it was just the banks of snow piled alongside every major lane of traffic, but sometimes it seemed to Minny that she was traveling through a city of tunnels, just another one of the mole people. The sensation was particularly strong on those gray, dismal days like today, when the sun failed to show itself behind the clouds.
She and Luka had established their own little circuit of stores, buildings, and restaurants soon after they decided to haul his newspaper equipment from his old office to his new one and move in together. It had been a long time since either one of them had ventured more than ten or fifteen blocks away from their apartment. But they had heard the same reports as everyone else. The snow had sealed the monument district off from the rest of the city. Luka had even written about it in a special double issue of the Sims Sheet. The district was framed by the river on one side and by a sliver of park and a pair of six-lane roads on the others. Beyond those borders the snowdrifts had become so high that the ground was almost impassable. All you could see were the corners of a half dozen billboards and the upper floors of a few tall buildings. It was as though the city were slowly digesting itself.
The man who always carried the signs with the religious messages printed on them passed by Minny and Luka with a placard that read, FOR OUT OF THE ABUNDANCE OF THE HEART, THE MOUTH SPEAKETH. He stopped and asked them if they had heard the sound.
He was talking about the heartbeat, Minny presumed. “I’ve heard the sound,” she said.
“Yes,” the man said, “we have all heard the sound, for it is the beating of His Sacred Heart.”
“Is it?”
“He’s coming soon. He’ll be carrying my Bible for me.”
“I’m glad,” Minny said.
The man flinched when she reached out to pat his arm, so she put her hand back in her pocket. “You stay warm now,” she told him, and she and Luka slipped around him and across the intersection and finally through the door of their building.
Luka spent the rest of the afternoon working on the next day’s edition of the newspaper while Minny read a novel by the light of the table lamp in the living room. The days, unlike the nights, passed quickly, and before she knew it she had finished the novel, and he had picked up dinner from the Korean restaurant down the street, and the two of them were standing at the kitchen counter eating noodles and kimchi out of waxed cardboard boxes. He was a journalist, with a journalist’s dining habits. And because she had never developed any firm dining habits of her own—cleaning habits, yes; reading habits, definitely; dining habits, no—she had been happy to adopt his when they moved in together.
“Which do you like better: the idea of the past or the idea of the future?” she said a few minutes later, as he was packing the leftovers away in the refrigerator.
“Not this game again.”
“The idea of the past or the idea of the future?” she insisted.
“You sound like an optometrist testing lenses. This one—or that one. This one—or that one.”
“You’re not going to answer me, are you?”
“Well, the contest is rigged, in my opinion. But I guess I’ll say the future. My real answer is the present.”
“Me, too. The future. Which do you like better: this world or the other?”
“A real life-or-death decision, huh?” he joked.
“This world or the other?”
“This world,” he said. “This world all the way.”
He closed the refrigerator and winked at her, taking two big steps across the kitchen floor.
And then it was night, and she was in bed, and she fell asleep right away for once, though the next night she lay awake for hours thinking about what it would have been like if the two of them could have had a child (and here was a question: if she could have given their child a certain amount of each of the five virtues—health, kindness, intelligence, charm, and beauty—how would she have distributed them, and in what proportions?), and the night after that about the hotel where she had died, the quarantine at the edge of the parking lot, and the warm glow of the vending machine in the lobby.
~
She wasn’t exactly sure when the heart stopped beating.
It might have been a few nights later, when she got up at two o’clock to walk around in the blue half-light of the apartment and heard a dripping sound that turned out to be the icicles melting outside the window. It might have been the next morning, when for the first time in weeks the sun came out burning hard and the birds reappeared from wherever they had been keeping shelter. It might have been the day after that, or the day after that, or even the day before. All she knew for certain was that there came a moment when she realized she could no longer hear the pulse that had accompanied her every waking moment for so long, and she felt as if something had died.
It happened like this: She was handing out newspapers with Luka when there was a short lull in the traffic, and suddenly it was quiet enough for her to notice the stillness in the air. She realized right away that something was wrong, something was missing. A fist seemed to tighten inside her stomach. “Listen,” she said to Luka.
He fell quiet for a moment, then whispered, “What is it I’m supposed to be listening for?”
“It isn’t there anymore.”
“What isn’t there?”
She gave him a hint: “Bump, bump. Bump, bump. Bump, bump.”
His expression shifted through three distinct stages—first confusion, then dawning recognition, and finally, as the weights tumbled into place, full understanding. “Hey, you’re right,” he said. “It’s gone.”
“I know it’s gone. I knew it all along.”
“You ‘knew it all along’? What does that mean?”
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to say that she had known since the beginning of their conversation—that that was all she had meant—but the truth was that she had something deeper in mind, something she couldn’t quite pin down, and she didn’t want to lie about it. “I don’t know. Honestly. I didn’t realize I was going to say that.”
“Understandable,” he said. “In fact, understood.”
First she smiled, and then suddenly she found herself fighting back tears. She turned away from him so that he wouldn’t notice. It had something to do with her sense that nothing was permanent, nothing would last. Hearts stopped beating. People put guns to their chests. There was no one and nothing she could ever know well enough to make it stay. It had been one of her chief preoccupations during the last few years of her life: the notion that there was not enough time left for her to really get to know anyone. Most people would say it was ridiculous. She understood that. She was only in her mid-thirties, after all. But whenever she would come into contact with someone new, someone whose stories she didn’t already know by heart, sooner or later that person would start talking about days gone by, and she would get the sad, sickening feeling that too much had already happened to him and it was far too late for her to ever catch up. How could she ever hope to know someone whose entire life up to the present was already a memory? For that matter, how could anyone hope to know her? The way she saw it, the only people she had any prayer of knowing or being known by were the people who had been a part of her life since she was a child, and she hardly even spoke to them anymore. Just her mother and a friend or two from high school, and that was about it. As for everybody else she met, well—there were too many shadows behind a person and there was too little light ahead. That was the problem. And there was no force in the world that would remedy the situation. People talked about love as a light that would illuminate the d
arkness that people carried around with them. And yes, Minny was capable of loving, but so what? As far as she could tell, her love had never improved things for her or anyone else, so what good was it? She could never rely on it. It weighed no more than a nickel. It was only after she died and met Luka that the vistas of time seemed to open back up for her, and she began to think that maybe she could know someone else as well as she knew herself—that her love might be enough to make a difference, after all.
But sometimes she would start to feel the death in things again, and that old doubt would come washing back over her, and she would fill with the terrible familiar fear that nothing had changed at all. She could never be whole in the eyes of anyone else. No one else could ever be whole in her own eyes. She had known it all along.
“Are you okay?” Luka asked her, and when she nodded, he said, “You seemed to be someplace else there for a minute.”
“I’m all right,” she said.
She wouldn’t ask him the question. She wouldn’t let herself.
The traffic had picked up again, and there was no longer enough silence in the air for them to listen for the beating of the heart. They handed out the last of the newspapers. Then they walked back home over the wet sidewalks, the flattened grass, and the heaps of melting snow.
It was another day of reading and staring out the window for Minny, cut off entirely from the world. Usually Luka would ask her to come along with him while he scouted the city for reports he could use in the newspaper, but she had come to sense when he wanted to be alone, and today was one of those days. It could be a pleasure to walk the pavement with only your own thoughts for company. She understood that.