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 gra-nola 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,
