his sisters, tagging on the occasional college friend that the two of them had brought home for a visit. There were his neighbors to remember. There were the people he knew from work, beginning with his first job sliding pizzas into ovens at Pizza D'Action and ending with his sixteen years at Coca-Cola. There were the members of his church, though when it came to church, he had never been what anybody would have called devout. He was more of an Easter-Christmas-and-whenever-someone-managed-to-drag-his-ass-out-of-bed-on-a-Sunday kind of guy. And then there were the thousands of loose friends who kept jumping into his memory – people who didn't fit into any obvious category, but nonetheless there they were, like acorns that came popping out of the grass as he mowed his lawn. There were the friends of those friends, and sometimes there was even another tier of friends beyond that. He added his girlfriends to the list (there had been seventeen of them), and his girlfriends' families, and then his first wife and her family, and his second wife and her family, and of course there was his son and his son's classmates and his softball team and his other friends from the block and whatnot. And there were all the people he had met at plays and dinner receptions and parties and weddings over the years. Oh, and then there were what he supposed he might call his personal commercial acquaintances, as opposed to his professional commercial acquaintances – his business contacts and such – though now that he thought about it, he guessed he would have to take them into account, as well. He was thinking of all the clerks and salespeople he knew by sight and sometimes even by name: the people who worked at the grocery stores, pharmacies, tool shops, garages, department stores, restaurants, and movie theaters he frequented.
Any number of times he imagined he was finished with the list, but he kept uncovering new clusters of acquaintances: his Boy Scout troop, the other guys at his gym, the twenty-some faces he remembered from his one disastrous AA meeting. He would go to the kitchen to rinse off a plate, and he would remember the plumber who had repaired his faucet for the past ten years, and the rotating lineup of plumber's assistants he had employed, and the son he had been forced to bring on call with him that one day when the schools closed down, who had put a deck of playing cards in Michael's toaster and almost set his kitchen on fire. Everything he saw, touched, or listened to seemed to remind him of a few more people he had neglected to write down. A woman he had seen at the library once and for some reason had never forgotten. His dentist and his dental hygienist. The guys he used to play pool with when he was in college. Finally, when he paged through his notes, he realized that he had forgotten somehow to list his sisters' extended families: their husbands and in-laws, his nephews and nieces, and on and on through the great cascade of additional people who seemed to be connected to everyone he knew, excepting only his brother, the one who had died, who was a broken thread to him and had no such connections.
When he tallied up the list he had made, the number he came up with was forty-two thousand, but for the next few days he kept discovering little pockets and byways of extra people – where did they all come from? – and if he had to guess, he would say that the number was probably closer to fifty thousand, or maybe even seventy.
'I can't believe it would be that high,' Joyce said when Puckett showed him the list. 'You must be imagining you remember people you don't really remember.'
'I was thinking it was probably too low, actually.'
'I doubt that.' He gave the dismissive little stiff-palmed wave of his fingers – nothing more than a twitch, really – that he always used when he wanted to drive Puckett crazy. 'Underestimation has never exactly been your defining characteristic.'
Puckett ought to have buried him when he had the chance.
Joyce had succumbed to the Blinks just a few hours after they set out for the penguin roost. He had taken on a sagging posture that Puckett had mistaken for sleep until the sledge rounded a curve and Joyce tipped over sideways, striking the window with the side of his face. All at once, Puckett knew the truth. He cut the engine and felt Joyce's neck for a pulse. His skin was still warm, but there was nothing moving beneath it – no air, no blood. Even the muscles had lost their tension. It was the seventh death Puckett had seen in the past two weeks. He was getting used to the signs.
It had occurred to him that he ought to try the old breath-on-the-mirror test he was familiar with from so many movies. But then again, he reasoned, it was hardly necessary when the person in question was so obviously dead.
He and Joyce had never known whether to treat each other as friends or antagonists. Or maybe it was just that their antagonism and their friendliness had been so inextricably tied up with each other that it was impossible for anybody to tell the two apart. It was through their arguments, their bickering, that they expressed their fundamental goodwill toward each other, and they both took a particular pleasure in pretending they disliked the other more than they did. It was part of the game. For Puckett to admit that he was upset over losing Joyce, then, would have been a violation of the rules.
To tell the truth, though, he wasn't as upset as he had guessed he would be. After all, there was a part of him that had known this was coming for a long time. He only wondered how long it would be before it came for him, as well.
It would have taken him the rest of the day and a good portion of the next to break into the ice and lay a respectable grave for Joyce, and it seemed more important to cover some more ground before the horizon swallowed all the good light, so he decided to bury him after he made it across the bay to the second transmitter. He started up the sledge and began following his compass over the ice. It wasn't long, though, before he felt himself becoming feverish and began losing awareness of his surroundings. It was the virus coming on – he knew it. His skin seemed to be coming loose from his skeleton, like a star casting off its final wobbling shell of gas. His eyes watered over and gradually lost their focus. The last thing he remembered was waking for a few moments some indeterminate time later and watching as a great wall of ice and black rock slowly grew larger in his windshield. Then he fell asleep again, and there was the pinwheel of gold and silver light, and when he tried to touch it, the petals folded together into a single enormous pillar, as tall and wide as a redwood tree. It was only through a supreme effort of his will and imagination that he was able to compress the pillar into a small rod the size of a #2 pencil – which was indeed a #2 pencil, the same pencil he would later use to prepare his list.
Joyce was the first person he saw when he arrived in the city. Immediately he knew that he must be dead. Puckett took a step back, stumbling over his shoes.
'What are you doing here?' Joyce asked him, and Puckett asked the same question, 'What are you doing here?' And then they argued about something for a while. And then they went their separate ways. And it felt good, it felt right, it felt just like old times.
Puckett had made no particular effort to stay in touch with Joyce, and he was pretty sure Joyce would say the same about him if anyone asked. But then staying in touch had not demanded any particular effort. Wherever they went, it seemed, they were destined to meet. Puckett could hardly walk into a bar or restaurant without finding Joyce at one of the tables, clicking the salt and pepper shakers together or making lean-tos out of the cardboard coasters, and if he was not there already, inevitably he would arrive within the next few minutes. He could not step out for a quick stroll, could not go shopping at the grocery store, without suddenly coming upon him at the deli counter or the back end of the soup aisle. They had run into each other at the movie theater, the gym, and the drug store, and at the random intersections of a thousand different streets. More than once Puckett had stepped out of a stall in a public restroom to find Joyce buckling his belt only one stall over. They were no longer surprised to see each other, and it was with a certain sense of fatality that they would take up whatever conversation they had left unfinished the last time they met.
Just one day after he told Joyce about the list he had made, for instance, Puckett ran across him on the ground floor of an office building. Puckett was dashing in to take a quick drink from the water fountain, and Joyce was walking across the black marble tiles of the lobby toward the elevators, and they saw each other and realized their paths were going to cross again. After a short pause Joyce said, 'I would wager I remember about two thousand people total.'
Puckett shook his head. 'No, I'm telling you, it's much higher than that. I'm not talking about the number of people you can call to mind without any effort at all, you know. I'm talking about the number of people you're capable of remembering when the right chain of associations occur. Sit down and figure it out sometime.'
'See, the difference between us is that you imagine your own memory is reliable, or at least reliable enough to offer up a basically trustworthy accounting of your life. And I don't. Not for a second.'
'I doubt my memory is any more reliable than yours. I just happen to know mine a little better.'
'Riddle me this then,' Joyce said. 'If everybody in the world remembered – what? fifty thousand people, you
