She moved out again with a renewed intensity. The few clouds that had been in the sky at dawn were gone now, and the air was scrubbed clean, so transparent that it played tricks with her notions of distance. Late in the afternoon, she saw a faraway structure with the low roof and squared off walls of the station, and her heart began to race. She accelerated toward the building, but suddenly it was gone. She activated the magnification feature on her windshield, but still she couldn't see it. She climbed down from the sledge to take a look around. Half a dozen steps behind the left runner she found the object she had seen. It was a juice box. A juice box with the low walls and squared off roof of the station. The familiar red and white Coca-Cola wave was slinking across the front, and the C. C. Juice slogan was printed just beneath it: 'The Great Taste of Cola… in a Juice!' Somebody must have dropped it traveling across the ice shelf. One of the scientists from the station, maybe. Or Puckett or Joyce.
For a moment she thought to pick it up and throw it into the sledge, but then a surge of irritation went through her and she backed up to take a run at the thing. The box made a wonderful popping sound when she kicked it, sailing across the ice in a long, straight line.
She climbed back into the sledge. The incident made her remember the story she had heard about the girl who was raised in a room with no horizontal lines. She couldn't recall whether the story was true or simply a thought experiment, but the room, as she remembered it, was decorated with a series of black vertical stripes on the walls, and the floor and ceiling were curved to give the illusion that the vertical stripes were continuous. On the child's first birthday, the story went, she was taken out of the room. She had learned how to recognize vertical forms, but not horizontal ones, so that if she was situated on a table, say, or a platform, she would crawl right off the edge, but she would never run into the corner of a wall or the leg of a chair. Her condition lasted for about a month before her visual sense finally corrected itself.
The experiment was supposed to have proven something about the development of human perception, though for the life of her Laura couldn't remember what.
As far as she could tell, the only thing it demonstrated was that babies were capable of being tricked, and who would be surprised by that?
That same day, as the last slice of the sun was sinking behind the ice, she saw another form taking shape in her windshield, a low-bodied object at the very corner of the horizon. It shone oddly in the fading light, blinking on and off as she bumped across the ridges. At first she thought it was just a mirage – or worse, another juice container.
But then she spotted the klieg lights standing on either side of it, two dazzling panels of honed white light. They showed the building in all its contours. There was no doubt about it this time. She had finally reached the station.
FIVE. THE HOMECOMING
Dying had changed Marion Byrd. She had been so weary back when she was alive: weary of talking and weary of eating; weary of thinking, remembering, desiring, anticipating; weary, most of all, of the prospect of seeing her life out to its natural end. She felt as though she had spent the last ten years of her life carrying a tremendous unshaped stone on her shoulders. The effort of keeping her legs upright and simply walking underneath it had nearly crippled her. She didn't know how to cast it off, or even where it had come from, only that she had to carry it.
But then the virus had appeared and she had died, and suddenly everything was different.
She began to appreciate all the things she thought she had forgotten how to enjoy, like music and dancing and the way the breeze felt on her neck when she pinned her hair up in back. The tension gradually worked its way out of her muscles. She looked forward to waking up in the morning.
And then there was the matter of her husband: it seemed only natural, with all the other changes she had undergone, that she would love him again.
She listened to him swishing his razor around in the sink, for instance, and then tapping it clean against the porcelain – tap tap tap – and she knew that he would clear his throat next, and then dry his face, and only after he had blown his nose into a tissue and carefully straightened the towel on the rack would he call out to her with some question or other. The whole unwavering performance used to fill her with despair, but these days she found herself charmed by it.
'Any sign of Laura yet?' he shouted, and she answered, 'Not so much as a rumor. Maybe later today, Phillip. We'll just have to wait and see.'
It happened like clockwork.
Laura was their only child. She had been on a prolonged business trip when the virus hit, conducting some sort of environmental survey on the opposite side of the world. The two of them had no idea what had happened to her. There had been little opportunity for them to say good-bye, not even enough time to place a phone call or send off an e-mail. Laura was only thirty-two years old – not yet married, not yet weary. When Marion was thirty- two, she had already abandoned a graduate degree, fallen in and out of love a half dozen times, met Phillip, and concluded that that era of her life was over. She had miscarried one daughter, given birth to another, named her Laura after Laura Ingalls Wilder, spent five years raising her, and then packaged her off to kindergarten and resumed working half days as a legal secretary. At the time she had imagined herself to be a woman, and the truth was that even in hindsight, when she remembered herself as she was back then, it was a woman she remembered, with a woman's wholly developed mind and a woman's full breadth of feeling. So why was it that when she thought of Laura she couldn't help picturing her as a little girl?
'I thought we would go to Bristow's today,' Phillip offered from the bathroom.
'This morning or this afternoon?' Marion asked.
'Well, this morning, I was thinking, but if you'd rather wait a while…'
'No, this morning will be nice. Just let me pick out a good pair of shoes.'
This was another thing she had forgotten how much she enjoyed: shoes. She had collected almost twenty pairs since she had died, including a beautiful pair of laced leather rainboots and a pair of high heels with tapering green straps that wound up her ankles like jasmine vines. Her shoes made her understand, in a way that jewelry and sunglasses and the other trappings of so-called feminine fashion never had, why people dyed their hair or wore tattoos. It was for the same reason that birds wove bits of thread or vinyl construction streamers into their nests: for the sheer pleasure of ornamentation. After she had chosen her shoes – a comfortable but attractive pair of dark blue flats – she grabbed her purse and headed back out to the living room. Phillip was still using the bathroom, so she inspected herself in the mirror that hung by the front door, wiping the oil from beneath her eyes with her thumbs. She kept her face as empty as she could. She could never stand to see herself smiling or glowering, blushing or frowning. Expressions of any kind, in fact, always bothered her. They seemed to turn her face into some kind of Halloween mask. Sometimes, even when she wasn't examining her reflection, when she was just thinking quietly or talking with her friends, she would realize that her face was taking on the cover of some emotion or other and immediately she would feel a little wash of discomfort pass through her features, distorting them like a stone tossed into a puddle. She was never sure whether her face was cracking apart because she felt so uneasy, or whether she felt so uneasy because her face was cracking apart.
Soon Phillip was ready to go. The two of them set out through the lobby of the building. The clearing across the street shone in the light of the sun. The pattern of walkways covering the grass seemed to carve it up into a giant wheel. Phillip and Marion had moved into their apartment at the center of the monument district less than a week after arriving in the city, just like everybody else who had heard the gunshots. At first there were only several hundred of them there, but within a few days there were several thousand, and soon nobody was quite sure how many of them there were. There had been talk of appointing a census-taker, but as of yet no one had taken on the position. A few of the long-term residents had told Marion and Phillip about what they called the evacuation – or sometimes the leave-taking – during which the city had so suddenly emptied out. But no one could say why the people who remained behind had not yet moved on, beyond suggesting that someone must still have been alive to remember them. Marion had seen the Blinks firsthand, though, and she found this theory hard to believe. Certainly she couldn't think of anyone she knew personally who might have evaded the virus. And when she realized that it would have to be someone Phillip knew, as well, and not only Phillip, but the flower vendor, and the newspaperman, and the man on the corner who begged for change, and the kid who poured pitchers of water
