The Brief History of the Dead

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, ru

"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.

Her name was Mi

"What book?" Luka asked.

"The Master and Margarita."

"Mikhail Bulgakov. I love that book."

"Me, too," she said. Luka watched as she brought her thumb and her forefinger to the corners of her lips. It looked as though she were trying to tug her smile down into a frown. A nervous tic, he supposed.

The blind man, who was leaning against the wall, took off one of his shoes and beat at the heel until a pebble rolled out. Then he squeezed his foot back inside. "The air is getting colder," he said suddenly, and sure enough, the sun was falling. The tops of the trees still caught its full light, but the trunks and the scaffolding of the lower limbs were sliced off by the hard shadows of the buildings, so that when Luka's vision blurred, he saw only the very highest branches. They looked like ornaments floating in the sky.

Mi

"Why?"

"You looked like you were about to faint there."

"Did I? I'm just tired from walking, I guess. Tired and hungry. We haven't eaten anything since this morning."