We saw people who’d died holding telephones, eating diet foods, looking at pornography. There was an old woman who cradled a red bong. But the bodies that spooked me most, that reside still in my memory, were the ones you couldn’t see. The closer we got to town, the more people seemed to have died outdoors. In driveways and on sidewalks, we came across contours in the snow that suggested humans were below. These white mounds may or may not have been the shadows of buried people. Scariest was the way your denial was allowed full discretion. I’d see a small snow-drifted form, and I’d tell myself, That’s not a child down there, the snow’s just buried a bicycle or perhaps a guitar case. Another such hump might simply be a pool raft, I’d think, or possibly a kayak. My mind could make up anything in its efforts to stop the inevitable: picturing all the people I knew who might be below — Jill Green, who ran the library reference desk; or Mike Magnason, proprietor of Video Utopia, where I was a preferred member.
To tell the truth, we didn’t need to go house to house to convince ourselves that everyone had been taken. Walking deserted streets, moving through empty neighborhoods, you quickly get used to seeing corpses. They’re so clearly soulless, so utterly void of humanity, that they’re just empty vessels. Soon, of bodies, all that mattered was the scale — a family here, a dozen there, a bushel, a mountain, a million. What you can’t get over, amid all the human bodies, is the total absence of humanity, the sheer lack of its force and energy.
Like power lines without voltage running through them, the world looked the same but was missing its crackle and buzz. Gone were voices. Missing were music, cooking, and the shouts of children. The ice-skating pond, usually white with the calligraphy of skate blades, was instead a mirror that mirrored only empty trees. From the Karate House came no shouts of Hai, hai, as teenagers snapped their white gis with each punch. The parking lot was full when we passed the Lutheran church, yet it felt hollow, in total want of prayer, and the bay windows of the senior center, normally filled with old people, were void of the crochet club and bingo hour. Never again would I see shrunken, ancient couples executing a brisk foxtrot, samba, or Virginia reel. The energy of humanity was simply gone, and that lack was everywhere: in the silence of a phone lifted from its cradle, in the stunned blankness of an interstate, in the stillness of television antennas, and the way you could somehow feel that the hydroelectric dam had gone off-line, three miles away.
We walked down Poplar Street, past River Drive and Meriwether. Where were we going? What excursion didn’t have a human interaction as its destination? Nearing the USSD campus, we passed the Everland Cemetery. How ridiculous the headstones looked, with their ordered spacing and uniform rows, as if the dying had stumbled toward their appointed slots and dropped into Grave L-19 or RR-124. What a laugh — as if the tablets of death could be sorted as simply as abacus beads. We saw an elk walking through the rows. It was a grand thing, with a tawny winter coat that tended toward coffee at the throat, and a muzzle that was nearly black. These were reclusive, wary beasts, so it surprised me to see one walking calmly through town. Only once in a great while did I lay eyes on an elk — occasionally, a herd would try to swim the Missouri, and one of them would invariably stop to rest on one of the sandy islands. From my office window, I could see when one got stranded. I’d watch it pace and fret out on the shoals, wading chest-deep until it felt the current and halted. When it lifted its head to call the others, the ones who’d swum on, I felt I could hear that mournful bray. This elk paused at a mausoleum, where it sniffed some plastic flowers. It rutted its antlers in the slats of a gazebo, then moved on.
My father and I behaved less nobly. We were more like the dogs being set free: stunned, curious, wandering stupidly from house to house, inspecting everything, recoiling at every false alarm. On campus, the backup generators were going, which meant that the emergency lights would shine another day or two. It also meant the central heat exchangers were functioning, and as we walked past the administration building, you could already smell the decay of warm bodies in the dorm rooms. All those students gone, every one of them gone, and I hadn’t even learned their names.
I made for the river, the square of the Missouri I thought of as mine. The snowfall was steady. When we crossed the white of Central Green, there was only a dome of visibility that centered on us — objects entered, stayed a while, then vanished. Snowy park benches came into view, inscribed in memoriam with the names of dead donors; it seemed unthinkably creepy to sit in them. Already I felt the cold of Janis’ monument out there in the white. Suddenly the idea of placing a monument to the loss of a single life sickened me. How could such an elaborate marker commemorate the passing of just one person, whereas the population of South Dakota had only this glut of snow as testament that they’d ever lived?
Dogs raced past us, feathers glued to their faces.
I steered Dad wide of where I thought Janis’ plaque must be.
Always, I’d striven to lift the veil of the dead, but that spirit now left me. Now I was happy to see only a surface of white, to snowshoe onward in ignorance of the assembled citizens and songbirds of Parkton below my feet. Teams of dogs rummaged through the snow. When we didn’t see them, we heard them, and when we didn’t hear them, we came across the hollows they’d dug to ferret out some manner of dead thing.
When we reached the riverbank, the Missouri was gone.
“My God,” Dad said.
“I never,” I said, shaking my head.
The river had simply run away, leaving a deep, empty channel at the center of which was a brook no bigger than Keno’s. For some reason, the snow in the riverbed didn’t stick, and here, between pools of trapped water, was Sheriff Dan’s infirmary. Here were hundreds of corpses, thousands of corpses. The bodies that had begun to decay before they’d been cast into the river marked the old waterline. Bloated and pink, they’d swelled large enough that their limbs didn’t touch the ground. They looked like pieces of inflatable pool furniture, beached along a rocky shoal. And the bodies that had been dumped frozen and wholesale into the water had sunk to the river’s icy floor and now lay exposed in the stiffening mud. Ropy and drawn, these poor souls appeared almost natal, as if constructed from discarded twists of umbilical cord. Darkened clothes and uniforms clung to dislocated limbs — arms stood tall and wild behind people’s backs, boots appeared to be laced on backward, and necks, it seemed, could do anything.
The utter stillness of this field of bodies was punctuated only by great reserves of gamefish clustered into small pools. The humps of large carp mooned from the water, the cartilage of their lips gobbling the surface for air. As other fish rolled and paddled, whiskers and spines would flash, and all the while small white perch leapt from the wells, only to land in the mud or, worse, in the cold crotches of humans. Desperately, the little fish would struggle to flop back in again.
How can I accurately describe the amount of death? How can I grab you by the shoulders and shake this death into you? In his best-seller Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe included the daily death tallies of London’s great plague. He gave the locations of all the mass graves, and detailed how many thousands were dumped in each. Still, later generations grew to disbelieve his descriptions, preferring to think them fiction. Not until the Nazi bunker bombs fell in World War II was the veracity of Defoe’s accounts confirmed. The explosions opened graves the size of auditoriums, making it snow calcium and rain a porridge of rancid bonemeal. A single buzz bomb sent a cloud of remains up from Brixton Square that rained thirty thousand skulls down upon the good people of London.