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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The Brief
History of The Dead by Kevin Brockmeier |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Kingly Kevin Brockmeier is neither the first
nor the last writer to write fiction about the afterlife. His novel, The Brief
History of the Dead, is both imaginative and well-written. Thanks to the
actions by executives of Coca-Cola, a plague has spread rapidly throughout
the earth. Brockmeier centers the plot around two groups of people: those on
Earth whom the plague has not yet struck, and those in some Earth-like
afterlife called “The City”, and who remain there only when they exist in the
memories of the few people left on Earth. Once the memories depart, the city
dwellers disappear. Some readers will find The Brief
History of the Dead reminiscent of the better Stephen King novels. Here’s
an excerpt, from the beginning pf Chapter 3, “The Encounter,” pp. 35-43: It was hot in the office, a
terrible, parching heat that lifted the smell of ink from the mimeograph
machine and filled the air with it. For a long time Luka sat at his desk
fanning the fumes away from his face. Then he opened the window and pulled
the vines out of the way, waiting for the breeze to come blowing through. The
quiet outside was nearly transcendent. There were no cars idling at the
stoplight, no children running past with balloons. There was nobody down
there at all. The air tasted like granite and river grass. He took a few deep
breaths and returned to his stencil. He was working on the
latest edition of the Sims Sheet. The
headline read ALONE IN THE CITY, and the subheading, in a slightly smaller
type, EDITOR WONDERS, IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE? That was as far as he had
gotten. He had spent the better
part of the morning stationed outside the River Road Coffee Shop with a full
stack of the early edition in his hands. From seven to eleven-thirty he had
stood there, completely alone, reading the headline to himself: THE GREAT
LEAVE-TAKING CONTINUES. Four and a half hours of waiting by the plate-glass
window where dozens of bodies used to sit shifting about on rickety wooden
stools, inching their coffees to the left as the sun came slowly into view.
Four and a half hours of counting the birds on the ledges and the bits of
trash blowing by on the street. Four and a half hours, and he saw not a
single human soul, not even the people he considered his regulars, like the
woman who wore the white beret, or the thin man in the wrinkled business
suit, or the dessert chef who always poked his head outside just as Luka was
packing up to leave. In all his years in the
city, this was the first time such a thing had happened. Who or what had
taken everybody he didn’t know. But that wasn’t the question that was
bothering him. The question that was bothering him was, Why hadn’t it taken
him as well? He allowed himself a few extra minutes to wait out any
stragglers before he finally gave up and walked home. On his way, he dumped
the entire run of newspapers in a garbage basket, then thought better of it
and fished them back out, then thought better of it again and threw them
away, but he kept a single copy, a memento, which he pinned to the wall
behind his desk. It would serve as a memorial for something—the day his hope
died out, maybe. Why was he still working on
the newspaper at all? He wasn’t sure. Habit, he supposed—something to keep
his hands busy, something to keep his mind occupied. He could already sense
where the whole thing was heading, though: down, down, down, into the
deepest, most embarrassing form of solipsism. He wasn’t looking forward
to it. He had always been the paper’s only writer, and now he was its only
reader, too. Soon, if he wasn’t careful, he would be issuing reports on his
own bowel movements. The L. Sims News & Speculation Sheet: All the Sims That’s Fit to
Print. Or, better yet: All the Sims That’s Sims to Sims. A tiny licking breeze came
into the office and stirred the air. He heard the vines that had fallen back
over the window rustling against the brick. He bent over his desk to tinker
with his lead: “At approximately 11:30 this morning, the editor of this newspaper
concluded that he was the last human being in the city. And perhaps, aside
from the birds, the last creature of any kind.” Or should he use a comma
before the “and”? Or a dash? Or a parenthesis? When he was in his early
thirties, five or six years before he died, he had taught an Introduction to
Journalism course at Columbia University and been astonished to discover how
many of his students—some of the best students in the city, mind you—were
incapable of writing a good opening sentence. Not only did they bury their
leads, they burned them, dismembered them, and then buried them. This had been one of his favorite classroom
jokes, though it had never gotten so much as a single laugh. No wonder. He
stuck the course out for three semesters—three semesters, two hundred
students, and one love affair, to be exact—before he decided to resume
writing full-time. He hated to say that reporting was in his blood, but it
did seem to offer him something that nothing else did: the exhilaration of a
million small facts. When he was working on a story, he felt as though he
were a paleontologist uncovering a set of bones, chipping away at the world
until he had enucleated some small, hard object he could catalogue and carry
away in his hands: a skull, say, or a breastbone. That was the real reason he
kept on writing the newspaper: he didn’t know how else to behave. He was a fool, of course,
and he knew it. He had traded the pleasures of conversation and friendship,
pleasures available to anybody who so much as stepped out his front door, for
a million hours of sitting alone in his office piecing together the next
day’s copy. He had taken it for granted that the community of the dead, and
earlier the community of the living, would always be there, waiting just
outside, and so he had neglected it, choosing to watch and listen from the
periphery rather than actually participate in it. He ought to have set his
notebook down, gone to one of the bars, and sought out a few drinking
buddies. He ought to have fallen in love with somebody, or at least tried. There were so many things
he ought to have done, but he hadn’t, and now it was too late. He decided to add the comma
to the “and,” and then he moved on to the next sentence, and before long he
had lost himself in the story he was telling. He must have been working
for half an hour before something finally snatched his attention. He lifted
his head. For just a moment he was
sure that he had heard a tapping noise. He set his paper aside and listened. There it was again, the
same tapping noise, like a tree limb brushing against a street sign. The
sound seemed to be coming from down on the street. When he went to the window
and looked outside, he saw the flag end of a coat disappearing around the
corner. Holy, holy, holy. He kept
repeating the word, first in his head and then oh loud. It was a broken-off
exclamation of surprise, something he was hardly even aware of thinking
until he heard his own voice. He bounded out of the
office and took the stairs at a gallop. The street directly in front of the
building was deserted, but he knew which way the coat had gone. He followed
after it. He felt the kind of rolling surge of high energy he had sometimes
felt as a teenager, when he would have to stop whatever he was doing to rush
into the field behind his house and hurl a softball or a tennis ball as hard
as he could, then push off from the grass to chase it down. He smacked a
parking meter with his hand as he rounded the corner of the sidewalk. At the
end of the block, he saw the coat vanishing behind the shining silver window
of a building, the polished black heel of a shoe flashing in its wake. He
redoubled his speed. “Wait!” he shouted. “Hold
up!” He was halfway down the
street before the figure in the coat reappeared, taking two steps away from
the corner of the building. He stood there with all the calm of a street
sign, the wind parting slowly around him. Something about the way he held his
arm extended toward the brick wall, like a diver keeping his line in reach,
told Luka that the man was blind, though he was not wearing dark glasses or
carrying a cane. The tapping noise Luka had heard from his office must have
been the sound of his shoes striking the sidewalk. Luka slowed to a jog as he
closed the gap. “Hey.” He was still breathing hard from his run down the
stairs. “Hey, I’m—” He gasped. “I’m Luka—” Another gasp. “Luka Sims.” The blind man cocked his
head to one side. “Are you real?” He placed a peculiar stress on the word
“real.” It felt so satisfying to be
talking to somebody that Luka found himself letting out a noise: a quick gust
of genuine laughter. “Are you?” he
said. Something tightened inside
the blind man’s face. “It’s been a long time since I could say so with any
certainty.” “Here,” Luka said. “Take my
hand,” and cautiously the blind man reached for it. The hand he gave Luka was
dry and callused, particularly at the fingertips, and it twitched when Luka
squeezed it. “There,” Luka said. “I’m as real as that. That’s about all I can
guarantee.” The blind man nodded as if
to say Close enough, then withdrew
his hand. “I didn’t think there was
anybody else left around here,” Luka admitted, though it seemed ridiculous
now, like a nightmare that had lost all its power as soon as the sun rose. After a moment, the blind
man asked, “What’s happened? Can you tell me?” “All I can give you is a
theory.” He switched into reporting mode. “It looks like the world—the other
world, I should say—is shutting down. From what I can gather, there was some
sort of virus over there, and it knocked out most of the population. Maybe
all of the population, I don’t know. And when they go, so do we. That seems
to be the way it works. Mind you, all of this is just a theory. It doesn’t
explain what the two of us are still doing here.” “I came here across a
desert,” the blind man said. And that evening, as he sat
lightly on the cushions of Luka’s sofa, like a paper kite poised to catch the
wind, he was still recounting the story. He had finished off the last of the
red wine and fettuccine Luka had prepared, and he was tearing tiny pieces of
his napkin off and collecting them in his palm. “I thought it was only the
whistling of the wind at first. It took me a while to hear the pulse.” The
blind man repeated the exact same detail for what must have been the sixth or
seventh time, and Luka made another little affirmatory noise. He was
unwilling to let the blind man go, unwilling to leave him alone for even the
few seconds it would take to rinse the dishes or put the leftovers away, for
fear that he would disappear. “All that sand, and it wouldn’t stop moving,”
the blind man said, and when he brought his hands together, the confetti
pieces of his napkin drifted to the floor. They stayed up talking
until long after the sun had set. Then Luka offered the blind man a place on
his couch to sleep, and because it was late and the blind man was still tipsy
from the wine, he accepted. Luka lay awake half the
night listening to him breathe. The next morning he was
still there, sitting on the sofa, running his hands over a wing-shaped piece
of driftwood that Luka had fished out of the river. He had folded the blanket
Luka had given him into a perfect square, positioning it in the center of his
pillow. When he heard Luka come into the room, he said, “I think there must
be more of us.” “More of us?” “More of us left in the
city.” “Why do you say that?” The blind man was quiet for
a long time. “Instinct.” And though Luka couldn’t
say why, he was inclined to agree. Since he had noticed the tapping noise
outside his window, he had been quick to investigate any unusual sound: a nut
falling from an oak tree, his refrigerator hatching another clutch of ice
cubes. He would let the sounds sail around in his short-term memory until he
was satisfied that he could identify them. Then he would get up and head to
the window or the kitchen just to make sure. It was as though every sound
that was not the wind or the birds or the river was by definition human. He
imagined people all over the city, hundreds of them, trying everything they
could think of to pierce through the walls of their solitude, but uncertain
there was anybody out there. Hundreds of faces behind hundreds of windows.
Hundreds of coats gliding around hundreds of corners. He was determined that
he wouldn’t stop looking until he had picked out every last one of them. He and the blind man spent
the day searching for anyone they could find. Luka tried to offer him his
elbow as they started out, but the blind man refused it. “A man who’s walked
as far as I have doesn’t need anybody’s help,” he said. Instead, he navigated
by trailing his hand along the wall of whichever building they were passing,
listening to the echo of his hard-soled shoes as they hit the sidewalk. The two of them began at
Luka’s apartment building, venturing outward in a series of linked rings.
“We should stay in one place,” the blind man argued. “Other people are going
to be out searching, too.” And he had a point—someone could easily happen by
the apartment building while they were away—but Luka was too restless to stay
put. He preferred to take his chances in the city. They walked down street
after street, the blind man shouting out, “Hello?” and Luka shouting out,
“Anybody?” every ten or twenty steps. “Hello? Anybody? Hello?
Anybody?” They passed bus benches and
empty storefronts and hundreds of abandoned cars, some of them stalled out in
the middle of the road. There were paperback novels lying open on the
sidewalk, and carry-away bags from Chinese restaurants, and even the
occasional briefcase or backpack. Once they found a skateboard rolling back
and forth in a drainage culvert, struggling against the wind. But they did
not see any people. It occurred to Luka that this was the first morning in
years he had failed to complete an edition of the Sims Sheet. And though it was true that the only reader he had
discovered so far was a blind man, and so probably not a reader at all, he
felt for a moment like a kid who had forgotten to do his homework. It was
something he knew about himself, something he had long known: there was
always a teacher standing somewhere over his shoulder. As the day wore on, he and
the blind man spiraled farther and farther away from their starting point,
reaching the river on one side and the skirts of the conservatory district on
the other, until the soft white-blue of the sky began to bruise over and they
headed back to Luka’s apartment building. It was understood between them that
the blind man would stay another night. Or another two nights. Or another
three. That he would stay as long as it took for them to discover or be
discovered by someone. Luka had no idea where the
man usually made his home. He didn’t seem to be the type of person who would
have a pet or a lot of possessions to take care of. Luka wouldn’t have been
surprised if he slept in a different place every night, on whichever couch or
bed or carpet he happened to find himself. He woke up early the next
morning to the smell of something cooking. He went into the kitchen. The blind man had found a
jar of batter in the refrigerator and was pressing waffles into shape between
the hinged metal pans of a waffle iron. Luka could see the batter sizzling
and darkening as it spilled over the circumference of the pan. “You know you talk in your
sleep,” the blind man said. As far as he could tell,
Luka had not made so much as a sound as he entered. “I do? What do I say?” “‘They’re still down
there.’ ‘The best thing I’ve ever done.’ That sort of thing.” Luka thought about it for a
minute. “I have absolutely no idea what that means,” he said. He ate a plateful of the
waffles, which were surprisingly well cooked—a perfect crisp brown at the
edges, but fluffy at the center—and then the two of them set off into the
city. They explored the same terrain they had covered the day before, but in
straight lines this time rather than linked circles, to make sure they hadn’t
missed anybody. They had to take shelter under the awning of a liquor store
during one of the city’s sudden thunderstorms, but the rain lasted only a
few minutes, and then they were off again. It wasn’t until late that
afternoon that they found another survivor. Readers may
not come away from The Brief
History of the Dead with any new philosophical insights, but will
appreciate good writing and another take on the end on the world. Steve Hopkins,
June 26, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the July 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Brief History of the Dead.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park,
IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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