Good Bones and Simple Murders

FICTION

SHORT FICTION

NONFICTION

POETRY

This is a game I’ve played only twice. The first time I was in grade five, I played it in a cellar, the cellar of a large house belonging to the parents of a girl called Louise. There was a pool table in the cellar but none of us knew anything about pool. There was also a player piano. After a while we got tired of running the punchcard rolls through the player piano and watching the keys go up and down by themselves, like something in a late movie just before you see the dead person. I was in love with a boy called Bill, who was in love with Louise. The other boy, whose name I can’t remember, was in love with me. Nobody knew who Louise was in love with.

So we turned out the lights in the cellar and played
Murder in the Dark
, which gave the boys the pleasure of being able to put their hands around the girls’ necks and gave the girls the pleasure of screaming. The excitement was almost more than we could bear, but luckily Louise’s parents came home and asked us what we thought we were up to.

The second time I played it was with adults; it was not as much fun, though more intellectually complex.

I heard that this game was once played at a summer cottage by six normal people and a poet, and the poet really tried to kill someone. He was hindered only by the intervention of a dog, which could not tell fantasy from reality. The thing about this game is that you have to know when to stop.

Here is how you play:

You fold up some pieces of paper and put them into a hat, a bowl, or the center of the table. Everyone chooses a piece. The one who gets the
x
is the detective, the one who gets the black spot is the killer. The detective leaves the room, turning off the lights. Everyone gropes around in the dark until the murderer picks a victim. He can either whisper, “You’re dead,” or he can slip his hands around a throat and give a playful but decisive squeeze. The victim screams and falls down. Everyone must now stop moving around except the murderer, who of
course will not want to be found near the body. The detective counts to ten, turns on the lights, and enters the room. He may now question anyone but the victim, who is not allowed to answer, being dead. Everyone but the murderer must tell the truth. The murderer must lie.

If you like, you can play games with this game. You can say: the murderer is the writer, the detective is the reader, the victim is the book. Or perhaps, the murderer is the writer, the detective is the critic, and the victim is the reader. In that case the book would be the total
mise en scène
, including the lamp that was accidentally tipped over and broken. But really it’s more fun just to play the game.

In any case, that’s me in the dark. I have designs on you, I’m plotting my sinister crime, my hands are reaching for your neck or perhaps, by mistake, your thigh. You can hear my footsteps approaching, I wear boots and carry a knife, or maybe it’s a pearl-handled revolver, in any case I wear boots with very soft soles, you can see the cinematic glow of my cigarette, waxing and waning in the fog of the room, the street, the room, even though I don’t smoke. Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.

Now: do you believe me?

The red geraniums fluorescing on the terrace, the wind swaying the daisies, the baby’s milk-fed eyes focusing for the first time on a double row of beloved teeth—what is there to report? Bloodlessness puts her to sleep. She perches on a rooftop, her brass wings folded, her head with its coiffure of literate serpents tucked beneath the left one, snoozing like a noon pigeon. There’s nothing to do but her toenails. The sun oozes across the sky, the breezes undulate over her skin like warm silk stockings, her heart beats with the systole and diastole of waves on the breakwater, boredom creeps over her like vines.

She knows what she wants: an event, by which she means a slip of the knife, a dropped wineglass or bomb, something broken. A little acid, a little gossip, a little hi-tech megadeath: a sharp thing that will wake her up. Run a tank over the geraniums, turn the wind up to hurricane so the daisies’ heads tear off and hurtle through the air like bullets, drop the baby from the balcony and watch the mother swan-dive after him, with her snarled Ophelia hair and addled screams.

The melon-burst, the tomato-colored splatter—now that’s a story! She’s awake now, she sniffs the air, her wings are spread for flight. She’s hungry, she’s on the track, she’s howling like a siren, and she’s got your full attention.

No news is good news, everyone knows that. You know it, too, and you like it that way. When you’re feeling bad she scratches at your window, and you let her in.
Better them than you
, she whispers in your ear. You settle back in your chair, folding the rustling paper.