PEOPLE LISTEN. It was a man-on-the-street piece, profiling some half dozen people he had confronted with a pair of questions on the subject: What did the heartbeat mean? And, Where did it come from? As usual there was no consensus of opinion. A man who identified himself as Martin Campbell said that the pattern of the heartbeat was familiar to him, but he couldn't figure out where he remembered it from. He was only sure that it made him want to go to sleep. A woman named Linda Terrell said, 'Don't you know? There's a giant heart buried beneath the subways. Take your shoes off. You can feel it beating in your toes.' One man claimed that the heartbeat was his own, though he would not explain how he knew this to be the case.
'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 love suffering, either.'
