We encountered no living humans. A flotilla of burned boats drifted past, and for a while train tracks paced the river, leading to a stalled Amtrak special that gave me the willies. A couple passengers still leaned against the windows, and you’d think they’d been rocked to sleep by the scenery and locomotion, were it not for the crystalline sprays of red on the glass. When Europeans colonized this hemisphere, 93 percent of the indigenous population died, from the tip of Chile to the Hudson Bay. But this process took many years, and the culprit was an all-star team: smallpox, cholera, typhus, diphtheria, typhoid, rubella, measles, and mumps. The Clovis disease only took ten days to devour everyone in sight.
And what a poor form of life it was. By consuming the kindling of humanity in one stroke, it burned itself out. Anything that rages so, quickly flickers. The successful forms of life are the parasites, the ones who bleed their environment to optimal exploitation, who stunt everything by taking a lion’s share, who leave their hosts alive but shriveled.
We fed the dogs and took an early supper near a motor-home park that appeared suddenly by the river. The awnings were out on the recreational vehicles, and plastic chairs had been blown about by the wind. Little dishes pointed toward quiet satellites, and a couple of the rigs wore multicolored wind socks and weather vanes whose blades were cut from sprightly-colored cans. All the inhabitants, we knew, were below us in the snow. Spring, grisly spring, would come!
I wished I could give those souls a proper farewell. I’m not talking about putting names to headstones. Names are the least telling information about a human. I wanted to document that they had been. I wanted a narrative of each person — his last meal, the tattoo inside her hipbone, the possession he clutched, and whether she was alone when the end came. Though their lives had been lost, their stories still lingered, and now was the time to study the remains. Now the site would yield the freshest data. I had the skills and the inclination, but, sadly, not the time. Passing by, all I could do was mark the location on my GPS map.
I only hope that you, future anthropologists, are well under way in your excavation of this calamity. I dream that one day you’ll account for all its victims. What a grand project, to exhume every human lost in the catastrophe, but are you not capable of it? Wouldn’t a society consisting of anthropologists take this task as its central focus? And why stop there? Why, in a golden age of anthropology, would it not be possible to account for everyone, for each person who’s ever been, since we first stood tall in Africa? If you have not already attempted to do so, I charge you to open the graves, drain the bogs, and sift the shores. Find everyone, ever, and record their existence in a giant book you shall call The Register of Being, the volumes of which you shall house in a building here named the Hall of Humanity.
That night, we camped near an ancient levy by the river. Only when Eggers climbed it in the moonlight did we see that it was a Native American burial mound, so large and complex we knew it was meant to be viewed from space. The next night, we camped where the river was deceptively broad, and we unknowingly placed our lean-tos and litter awnings out on the ice. We didn’t realize it until late, when the fire melted through the ice. In a steamy, ashy shush, it disappeared. The embers died like shooting stars under our five-gallon buckets as the current swept them away.
As we moved farther north, the temperature dropped. The slightest cloud would cause the snow to ice over, reflecting things with dazzling clarity. A few moments of direct sun meant you were mushing through ice porridge. How my senses were alive. Had I never heard the clack of bare tree branches in the wind? Did I never before notice the scent released when a wood-boring beetle drilled into birch? Passing along the river with the sun straight up, you could make out the gold fillings and diamond earrings on fat corpses, lodged under shelves of ice. On the back of an enormous woman, I saw the green-orange tattoo of a Japanese carp.
Dog breath, rhythmic and misty, ushered us on.
My greatest proof of the afterlife was the fact that the land wasn’t haunted by a billion souls. You didn’t feel their weight moving through the woods, or see the light of sunset distorted by the slow, vaporous march of the newly dead along the horizon. Tree limbs weren’t laden with the departed, faces didn’t shimmer back when you knelt to drink meltwater, clouds weren’t fleshy with human forms. The world was thin and light, crisp as newspapers blowing over the snow, sharp as the aqua flash of sunlight through power-pole resistors. Were the souls of the lost sharing the earth with us, their energy would traverse it in squalls of dark weather, filled with warm, electrical rain. Their energy would melt the ice.
Previously, it was my belief that humans left a signature on earth, a certain resonance that could be felt. Now corpses confirmed the opposite. Desiccated corpses cast their purply, deflated corneas not upon angelic light but on the freezing rust of Farm-All plows. Their cracked, withered ears heard not the calls of loved ones, but the dry whistle of fence wire. Of this contradiction, I can only offer the following: People need people, in life and beyond. When the earth was full, souls gravitated here. And now that it is empty, they have sought solace someplace else.
On the fourth day we passed a sign that read “Entering Central Time Zone.” How bizarre it seemed at first—moving into another arena of time—but the idea grew on me. In this new time zone, the river seemed to behave a little differently. The Missouri was flowing faster, I believed, though I couldn’t be sure, because we were sledding hard upstream, and when things floated down — a beer keg, a bloated horse, a dog on a piece of ice — they already appeared to be marching double-time. We made camp near an old train bridge. Here we were sure something was up. The river looked leaner and faster, the water taking on the cocoa color of silt scoured from the channel floor.
Eggers and Trudy walked out upon the trestle. They dangled their legs above the water. Gerry and Farley were off foraging, and I was pulling baby-sitter duty. I sat on a bucket, directing the kids on how to dig birds out of the snow in order to harvest their tail feathers, which I attached to the base of atlatl darts. There was an irony I didn’t like in removing the feathers of birds and asking them to fly again, in the service of killing other animals. But I didn’t mention this to the kids. When I looked up at Eggers and Trudy once more, they were swinging their legs, and that simple intimacy made me think of Yulia.
I’d gone a long way in defeating my weaknesses on this trip. I’d conquered my desperate hope that Yulia was alive by simply deciding she was alive. And it was with knowledge that I defeated speculation: I knew what Yulia’s house looked like. I knew what foods were in her cupboard. So, when I imagined — over and over — entering her hothouse and lowering her to my bearskin coat and demonstrating the Celsius of my passion, the copper watering can by her side and the shiny tools on the wall weren’t products of my imagination, but real pieces of her life, pieces she’d given me. It was Vadim who haunted me. It was his yellow jacket I constantly saw in my peripheral vision.