The Brief History of the Dead - Brockmeier Kevin - Страница 44

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Meaningless. Pointless. Hollow.

Sleepy Hollow.

Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.

She tossed the spare aerial onto the sediment heap, then thought better and retrieved it. What could she possibly use it for? A depth measure? An ice gouge? She didn't know, but she hated to throw it away. In truth, she hated to throw anything away. She had been accumulating unnecessary objects around herself all her life: knickknacks, old magazines, twigs she had snapped off of dying trees. Occasionally she would look at them, pick them up, even turn them over in her fingers, and she wouldn't be able to remember where they came from. They were like those skeletonized images from her early childhood that sometimes flashed into her mind when her thoughts began to drift, disconnected from anything that might put them into context. Walking into a brightly lit room with her hair tickling her forehead. Her father lifting a heavy jar out of a cabinet. A dog with a red bow pasted onto its nose. These knickknacks, these memories – where had she collected them all? Her apartment back home was practically an abandoned city of worthless objects: acorns, plastic keys, and ten thousand other things she had no earthly use for. But she had to admit that she liked having them there. At some point, when you were fourteen or fifteen, before you reached adulthood or knew who you were, you had to determine whether you were going to be the sort of person who held tight to every single thing that passed through your life, no matter how insignificant it was, or the sort of person who set it all adrift. Life was easier on the people who were willing to relax their grip, but she had decided to be the other sort of person, the sort who wouldn't let go, and she had done her best to live up to that decision.

There was no sign that Puckett and Joyce had made it as far as the rookery – no abandoned equipment, no sledge tracks. She doubted she would see them again. But then she had guessed as much long ago.

She set the tent up on a patch of hard ice, unloading the sleeping bag, the Primus stove, and the rest of her cooking supplies. Her hands were so numb that she was unable to drive the stakes into the ground. Instead, she used four rocks she found lying in a pile at the base of the cliff, weighing down the tent's inside corners.

She couldn't help thinking of the secret fortress she had played in the summer she was ten years old. That was what she had called it, "the secret fortress," though it was really just a free-standing public restroom in a section of the riverfront that had been fenced off and sold to developers. For a few months, though, until it was demolished to make way for an office complex, she and her best friend, Minny Rings, had gone there almost every afternoon to talk about boys and hide from their parents and plot their lives together. Sometimes they would pretend they were grown women, mothers with jobs and families, sometimes spies or basketball players or marine biologists. Laura still remembered the day they had ducked through the loose corner of wire fence and found the bricks and tile and porcelain of the fortress flattened into a surprisingly small heap. The bits and pieces had looked so flimsy and pathetic there, as though they never could have sheltered anything at all, not even a row of toilets, metal sinks, and hot air driers, much less the enormously complicated worlds the two of them had imagined. They had looked, in fact, like the debris of the hut did now, which must have been why she was thinking about them in the first place.

But before the fortress was knocked down, she and Minny had walked there nearly every day for the whole of June and July, excepting only the week Laura spent at summer camp. Usually they would meet at Minny's house, cut through the woods in back of the grocery store, and follow the long gray band of the access road to the river, balancing toe by toe over the rocks that lined the water. The fortress was hidden from the sidewalk by a thick belt of mixed trees, and as long as they were careful not to be seen beforehand, they could slip underneath the fence and make their way onto the construction site without being spotted. They were just two girls playing by the river. No one would interrupt them. The fortress's door was unlocked along with the high, tilting windows, and they never had any trouble getting inside.

"Which do you like better: summer or winter?" Minny would ask once they were alone. This was her favorite type of question. "Say it's a clear day. It isn't raining or snowing, and the sun is out."

"I don't know. Winter, I guess. If you ask me in the winter, I'll say summer, and if you ask me in the summer, I'll say winter."

"I choose winter, too," Minny said. "Here's another one. Who do you like better: your mom or your dad?"

"That one's tough. It's like winter and summer, I guess. I like whichever one isn't around at the time." Laura boosted herself onto the rim of the sink. "I can tell you one thing, I like your mom better than your dad."

"Me, too," Minny said. "My dad is a jerk. Do you know what he did yesterday? He dumped the ashtray over on purpose, right onto the carpet, and he made me clean it up. I didn't knock it over, and that's what I told him: 'I didn't do it.' But he said, T didn't ask whether you did it or not. I told you to clean it up, young lady.' He's always doing stuff like that. One time – " Minny cocked her head. "Hey, do you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"Listen."

Laura shifted her attention to the upper end of her hearing register. She heard it – a fine droning hum that beat rapidly at the air. She hopped down from the sink. The sound was coming from the skylight in the center of the room. She stood beneath it looking up, and Minny stood next to her. There was a wasp inside, bumping against the barrier of the glass. Its wings were a nearly invisible brown blur, and its stinger was floating beneath its body in the stately, motionless way of a diving bell on the underside of a boat.

"You're never going to get out through there," Laura said. She supposed she was talking to the wasp, though she knew better than to think that the wasp was listening. To Minny she said, "We should try to help it."

"No way. I am not touching a wasp."

"You don't have to touch it. You don't have to get anywhere near it. Just hold the door open, and I'll do the rest."

Minny glanced at the skylight. "If you want to get stung, I'm not going to stop you. I don't know why they put that thing in here to begin with. It's not like it lets any real light through." Then she went to the door and pulled it open, steering herself behind as she pivoted back toward the corner. Her voice came out from inside the closed triangle of space. "Okay. I'm ready."

"Chicken," Laura said.

"Fine by me," said Minny. "At least I won't get stung."

"Neither will I," Laura said. "I'm trying to help him." She knew she was being foolish, but she couldn't help herself. It was just that she felt so bad for the wasp: all it wanted was a way out, a way back into the sunlight, but the only thing it knew how to do was keep banging into the glass. She had to coax it away from the skylight. That was the first step. The problem was that it was too high for her to reach. She considered snapping at it with her T-shirt, but she was afraid that if she took the shirt off, the white skin of her chest and stomach would offer the wasp a target it couldn't resist. Instead, she took a paper towel from the bundle beneath the sink, worked it into a ball, and threw it at the wasp as gently as she could. Its wings buzzed, and its stinger curved angrily under its waist. She threw a second time, and then a third, aiming for the center of the glass.

After a few more tries, she managed to drive the wasp out of the skylight. It landed halfway across the room on the ceiling, dropped a few inches, and landed in the same spot again. She tried to reason with it. "Listen, I'm trying to help you. Just trust me and I'll let you outside."

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