counting into the thousands and the tens of thousands, taking one step after another in the same sort of blind compulsion that drives suicides to the edges of buildings, crossing through first the front room, then the kitchen, then the dining room and the bedroom and the living room, over and over again, until finally she would stop without thinking by the couch or one of the beds and collapse backward onto the cushions, falling with her legs rigid and her arms stretched out like a child playing catch-me.
It was one of those mind-emptyingly repetitious activities that people take up in order to suppress their anxiety. Some people rocked back and forth, or danced, or drummed their fingers on a tabletop. Some people exercised with heavy machinery. Laura paced.
Her walk was quick and steady – a march, almost – and it always cleared her head. At least for a while. But as soon as she stopped to rest, she would begin thinking about her friends and family again, begin thinking about even the most glancing acquaintances. She would remember her smallest interactions with virtual strangers, people who were very probably dead now. She would hear all the things they had said to her, bumping around inside her head like flies against a window. Bump – and Martin Campbell, the boy she used to baby-sit, would hop onto her lap and say, 'Can a lion beat up a tiger? Can a shark beat up an alligator?' Bump – and her mail carrier would knock on her door (this was during the week she came down with the flu) and say, 'You can't just let your letters pile up like this, Ms. Byrd. I won't squeeze anything else into that box until you empty out what's already there. Oh, and God bless you.' Bump – and her boss would tell her, 'I don't care if you think you got suckered into it. You can't back out on me this late in the game, Laura. You're our woman, you're going to Antarctica, and that's the end of it.' Bump – and she would hear them all at once, not only her boss and her mailman and Martin Campbell, but everybody, a tremendous crowd noise, as though all the people she had ever encountered were clamoring to her in their millions of voices.
She had been at the station for three or four weeks already, and her body had slowly repaired itself. She was no longer sore when she got out of bed in the morning. The hitch in her back had vanished, along with the ulcers in her mouth and the rivery tingling sensation in her toes and her fingers. She could almost feel her muscles knitting themselves back together, becoming strong again, bending and firm, like a suit made out of chain mail. True, there was still a bruise on her left leg from the time she had stumbled against the corner of the sledge, but it was gradually yellowing out and losing definition. She could barely even feel it anymore.
The food locker was fully stocked, with hundreds of boxes of vegetables and hundreds of cuts of meat. The pantry was stuffed with containers of rice, beans, and milled grain, alongside dozens of cases of soda and bottled water. She could easily stay in the station for another year without eating all the food, but she wasn't sure if she should. If Joyce's journal was correct, and the virus had infiltrated the station along with the last delivery, there was every chance in the world that the food was contaminated, as well. Unfortunately, without the equipment to test for the virus and some better idea of what she was looking for, she had no way of knowing for sure. No way other than by weakening and dying, that is, and she had been eating freely from the station's food supply for weeks now without any sign of infection. In fact, she was healthier than she had been when she arrived.
So maybe the virus had already died out. Maybe it needed sunlight in order to propagate, multiple hosts in order to survive. Or maybe it was simply biding its time, incubating in her blood, leaving glistening silver slug-trails as it slowly crawled toward her heart.
Whatever the answer, she didn't see that she had any choice in the matter. She would have to keep feeding herself from the pantry and the locker. The food she had brought in the sledge was down to a few last bags of granola and a half-dozen hardened biscuits. If she was going to get sick, she was just going to have to get sick.
Bump – and she heard her mother saying, 'Honey, if you sleep with the fan blowing full blast on you like that, don't you know you'll catch fever?' Bump – and then her ex-boyfriend said, 'You do realize 'communication' has the same root as 'communicable,' don't you?' Bump – and the man sitting next to her in La Hacienda Mexican Restaurant said, 'Sweet fabulous Lord, I'm hungry!' tucking his napkin into his collar like a bib. She did not think she knew the man, though she must have met him at some point. She began to walk the floor again.
It was the first entirely dark week of winter. Occasionally she would become restless, bored with her circuit of pacing, and she would open the door and walk outside for a while, though never without donning her protective clothing – snowsuit, boots, mask, and gloves. She would look at the moon and the stars, or at the tattered layer of cirrus clouds, or at the scarves of the aurora – which, because of the scrubbed transparency of the air, seemed to rest just a few yards above the ice. The klieg lights ticked every so often. The station's vents gave off clear rivulations of heat. The weather was cold enough to flash-freeze the moisture in her breath, and on those rare occasions when the wind was perfectly still, she could hear a thousand particles of frost falling to the ground as she exhaled, chiming like tiny bells as they hit the ice.
Even after all the time she had spent living in the Antarctic – and how long had it been? six months? seven? – she still patted her clothing down for a key whenever she headed back to the station. She would experience a split second of panic when she realized her pockets were empty. Then she would remember that the door was not locked, was never locked, and her heart would grow still again. This happened countless times.
She wondered how many other useless habits she was carrying around with her. Without even trying, she could think of at least two: she still left a spoonful of soup in the pot after she was finished cooking, so that no one would accuse her of taking the last serving, and she still coughed quietly before she opened the bathroom door, which was something her father had taught her to do in case anyone was sitting inside. She believed she had managed to cast aside most of the rest of her useless social habits – habits she had accumulated over a lifetime of living with other people. But there were almost certainly a few others she remained unaware of and was unable to put aside, habits she had no need of here at the bottom of the world.
The bottom of the world. Despite all her years of education, that was still how she thought of this place. When she was a girl, she used to believe that if she began digging a hole in her backyard and kept digging until she passed through the center of the earth, she would eventually emerge upside down on the bottom of the world. She had imagined it as a place where everything was wrong, topsy-turvy, where everything was exactly the opposite of what it should be. The clouds were like mountains, the sky like a blue lake, and the stars were like smooth white pebbles resting beneath the water. The people who lived there crept across the ceiling of the earth like spiders. She had pictured them clinging to the grass in a strong wind, holding fistfuls of it in their hands, struggling not to tumble into space. The idea frightened her. She had decided then and there that the bottom of the world was a place she never wanted to visit.
She could never have guessed that she would live there someday – and not just at the bottom of the world, but at the bottom of the bottom of the world. Could never have guessed that she would almost certainly die there. But then, she could never have guessed so many things. That she would fall out of love with the man she dated in college and never speak to him again. Or that a degree in environmental biology would send her to work for the Coca-Cola Corporation. Or that her father would live through two separate heart attacks and a minor stroke without dying.
'You and your mother,' she heard him saying. 'It could be ninety-eight degrees outside, and as soon as the air conditioner comes on, you both complain that you're freezing.'
Bump.
SEVENTY-EIGHTH ENTRY, MARCH 11. And then there were none. 'Ashes, ashes, they all fall down.' Or how did it originally go? 'Atishoo, atishoo, they all fall down.' About the Black Death, right? Though I can't remember who told me that. The 'ring around the rosie' part was for the red marks on the skin of the infected, the 'pocket full of posies' part for the flowers they were buried with, and the 'atishoo, atishoo'part for the sneezing that came over them before they died. I suppose the 'ashes' version would do just as well, though. 'Ashes.' I feel like the survivor of a volcanic eruption, one of those poor wasted souls who come stumbling out of the char when the whole damned thing is over and done with, saying they climbed down a well or ran into the hills to wait out the catastrophe. Weisz died yesterday. We buried him this morning. He was the last to go. The man was in pretty bad shape these last two days. I suppose I should say that it was a blessing he finally went, but none of this feels like a blessing to me. It feels like a curse. A goddamned curse. Jesus. What a waste. Now its just Puckett and me. Managed to find one more bit of information on the Web – part of a diary or personal log by some high school kid. Said that the incubation period was a matter of hours or days at the most. Here's what he wrote: 'A few of us are
