A Supermarket in California carried the dead into the underworld, across the river Styx. The River Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused those who drank its waters to experience complete forgetfulness. The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life. In "Story Line", Ian Marshall suggests that the poem is written to show the differences in American life depicted by Whitman and that which faces Ginsberg in the 1950s: "It's the distance of a century—with Civil War and the 'triumph' of the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism and Freud
The Brief History of the Dead itself expands and contracts to accommodate the recently dead or the death of the last people to remember them. On earth things have continued on the trajectories predicted at the beginning of the century: The polar ice caps are melting and biological terrorism is a major societal concern. However, the Coca-Cola Company is trying to make the best of both developments by planning to use water from Antarctica in its soft drink; they use publicity stunts which exploit people's fears in order to build brand interest. As part of their latest publicity stunt, they send a team of scientists to