'Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Coffee.'
She bumped him with her shoulder, playfully. 'I can't argue with that, I guess.'
There were places where the snow had risen so far toward the roofs of the parked cars that they stretched down the side of the road in a series of identical, oddly shaped lumps, like the knots of someone's spine. The sidewalks were slippery with ice. Maybe it was just the banks of snow piled alongside every major lane of traffic, but sometimes it seemed to Minny that she was traveling through a city of tunnels, just another one of the mole people. The sensation was particularly strong on those gray, dismal days like today, when the sun failed to show itself behind the clouds.
She and Luka had established their own little circuit of stores, buildings, and restaurants soon after they decided to haul his newspaper equipment from his old office to his new one and move in together. It had been a long time since either one of them had ventured more than ten or fifteen blocks away from their apartment. But they had heard the same reports as everyone else. The snow had sealed the monument district off from the rest of the city. Luka had even written about it in a special double issue of the Sims Sheet. The district was framed by the river on one side and by a sliver of park and a pair of six-lane roads on the others. Beyond those borders the snowdrifts had become so high that the ground was almost impassable. All you could see were the corners of a half dozen billboards and the upper floors of a few tall buildings. It was as though the city were slowly digesting itself.
The man who always carried the signs with the religious messages printed on them passed by Minny and Luka with a placard that read, FOR OUT OF THE ABUNDANCE OF THE HEART, THE MOUTH SPEAKETH. He stopped and asked them if they had heard the sound.
He was talking about the heartbeat, Minny presumed. 'I've heard the sound,' she said.
'Yes,' the man said, 'we have all heard the sound, for it is the beating of His Sacred Heart.'
'Is it?'
'He's coming soon. He'll be carrying my Bible for me.' 'I'm glad,' Minny said.
The man flinched when she reached out to pat his arm, so she put her hand back in her pocket. 'You stay warm now,' she told him, and she and Luka slipped around him and across the intersection and finally through the door of their building.
Luka spent the rest of the afternoon working on the next day's edition of the newspaper while Minny read a novel by the light of the table lamp in the living room. The days, unlike the nights, passed quickly, and before she knew it she had finished the novel, and he had picked up dinner from the Korean restaurant down the street, and the two of them were standing at the kitchen counter eating noodles and kimchi out of waxed cardboard boxes. He was a journalist, with a journalist's dining habits. And because she had never developed any firm dining habits of her own – cleaning habits, yes; reading habits, definitely; dining habits, no – she had been happy to adopt his when they moved in together.
'Which do you like better: the idea of the past or the idea of the future?' she said a few minutes later, as he was packing the leftovers away in the refrigerator.
'Not this game again.'
'The idea of the past or the idea of the future?' she insisted.
'You sound like an optometrist testing lenses. This one – or that one. This one – or that one.'
'You're not going to answer me, are you?'
'Well, the contest is rigged, in my opinion. But I guess I'll say the future. My real answer is the present.'
'Me, too. The future. Which do you like better: this world or the other?'
'A real life-or-death decision, huh?' he joked.
'This world or the other?'
'This world,' he said. 'This world all the way.'
He closed the refrigerator and winked at her, taking two big steps across the kitchen floor.
And then it was night, and she was in bed, and she fell asleep right away for once, though the next night she lay awake for hours thinking about what it would have been like if the two of them could have had a child (and here was a question: if she could have given their child a certain amount of each of the five virtues – health, kindness, intelligence, charm, and beauty – how would she have distributed them, and in what proportions?), and the night after that about the hotel where she had died, the quarantine at the edge of the parking lot, and the warm glow of the vending machine in the lobby.
She wasn't exactly sure when the heart stopped beating.
It might have been a few nights later, when she got up at two o'clock to walk around in the blue half-light of the apartment and heard a dripping sound that turned out to be the icicles melting outside the window. It might have been the next morning, when for the first time in weeks the sun came out burning hard and the birds reappeared from wherever they had been keeping shelter. It might have been the day after that, or the day after that, or even the day before. All she knew for certain was that there came a moment when she realized she could no longer hear the pulse that had accompanied her every waking moment for so long, and she felt as if something had died.
It happened like this: She was handing out newspapers with Luka when there was a short lull in the traffic, and suddenly it was quiet enough for her to notice the stillness in the air. She realized right away that something was wrong, something was missing. A fist seemed to tighten inside her stomach. 'Listen,' she said to Luka.
He fell quiet for a moment, then whispered, 'What is it I'm supposed to be listening for?'
'It isn't there anymore.'
'What isn't there?'
She gave him a hint: 'Bump, bump. Bump, bump. Bump, bump.'
His expression shifted through three distinct stages – first confusion, then dawning recognition, and finally, as the weights tumbled into place, full understanding. 'Hey, you're right,' he said. 'It's gone.'
'I know it's gone. I knew it all along.'
'You 'knew it all along'? What does that mean?'
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to say that she had known since the beginning of their conversation – that that was all she had meant – but the truth was that she had something deeper in mind, something she couldn't quite pin down, and she didn't want to lie about it. 'I don't know. Honestly. I didn't realize I was going to say that.'
'Understandable,' he said. 'In fact, understood.'
First she smiled, and then suddenly she found herself fighting back tears. She turned away from him so that he wouldn't notice. It had something to do with her sense that nothing was permanent, nothing would last. Hearts stopped beating. People put guns to their chests. There was no one and nothing she could ever know well enough to make it stay. It had been one of her chief preoccupations during the last few years of her life: the notion that there was not enough time left for her to really get to know anyone. Most people would say it was ridiculous. She understood that. She was only in her mid-thirties, after all. But whenever she would come into contact with someone new, someone whose stories she didn't already know by heart, sooner or later that person would start talking about days gone by, and she would get the sad, sickening feeling that too much had already happened to him and it was far too late for her to ever catch up. How could she ever hope to know someone whose entire life up to the present was already a memory? For that matter, how could anyone hope to know her? The way she saw it, the only people she had any prayer of knowing or being known by were the people who had been a part of her life since she was a child, and she hardly even spoke to them anymore. Just her mother and a friend or two from high school, and that was about it. As for everybody else she met, well – there were too many shadows behind a person and there was too little light ahead. That was the problem. And there was no force in the world that would remedy the situation. People talked about love as a light that would illuminate the darkness that people carried around with them. And yes, Minny was capable of loving, but so what? As far as she could tell, her love had never improved things for her or anyone else, so what good was it? She could never rely on it. It weighed no more than a nickel. It was only after she died and met Luka that the vistas of time seemed to open back up for her, and she began to think that maybe she could know someone else as well as she knew herself – that her love might be enough to make a difference, after all.
