The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier Read Free Book Online

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