The Book on Fire (25 page)

As he wandered through the broad hallways of the museum he
encountered bones, singly or in heaps, and these interested his eye as much as
the marble and granite faces. Each was perfect, he saw, and realized he only
saw this because they were laid at the feet of the imperfect carvings, which
made bone of flesh. He picked up a thighbone and held it, sidelit by a window,
and saw the easy, perfect plunge and curl of its lines. Something in the shape
compelled him and he could not drop the bone. As he exited the museum, he
placed it upright in an urn filled with soil. The bone acquired a strange life,
planted upright in the dim hallway, pale stalk supporting a pale, plump bud. He
walked away from it, then turned back and gazed at the planted bone a long
time. If that bone unfurled, what bloom might it release? He imagined the
shapes of the petals, elongate, elliptical, like fingertips opening into the
shadows.

****

He
began to notice that certain interiors, whether church or mosque, café or
cinema, unbuttoned his ribs and allowed him to breathe, allowed his figments to
squawk and whisper in the corners, behind the wainscoting. But others, for no
discernible reason, dropped cobwebs across his skull, sealed his lips and
nostrils with gray gossamer, so he could not breathe and must clamber out,
knocking over chairs, and only the next day would he discover the bruises on
his shins. Likewise, certain vistas seemed ominous to him: a particular view
from a hotel balcony looking inland, to the desert, in which the angles of the
roofs seemed to lacerate the space and the gray smudge of land beyond was like
a greasy thumbprint at the base of the sky. A certain curving street he could
not go down. Where did the malignancy reside?

Sitting in the freeing spaces, he pondered this. Was there some
shape to his spine that certain interiors altered, distorted? Or were there in
fact ghosts, the memories of dire deeds resident in certain structures? His
thoughts turned to ghosts and what he knew of them. He’d assumed that the
scraps left after the departure of breath were only bone, but tales of ghosts
were manifold. Where did they spring from, if they existed? What part of a
being, what part of himself, might pass into the wind, into the shadows? Did
the ghosts stay beside their bones, tethered to the bones by long fine leashes,
or were they tethered to the site of the deed that did them in? Or free to
roam? Could they speak? Could they reason, these ghosts, or were they merely
lamentation incarnate, a thickening of the grief that surrounds us? Did they
have communion, and, if so, with whom? With each other, ghostly tea parties? Or
with certain individuals whose spirits were large enough or diffuse enough or
warped enough to speak with ghosts? And did they take on appearances, these
ghosts, could they cloak their sorrows in the seeming of a man, a girl, and go
strolling? How does eternity lay its hands on moments?

As these questions rose and subsided unanswered, he picked up a
bone—a bone of the upper arm, he thought—and its solidity and whiteness seemed
a rebuke to his queries. He did not know the names of the bones, could not recognize
more than half a dozen, but, crouching by a skeleton, he saw there were
hundreds of bones, some small as dice, delicate as stamens. Did each have a
name? Living in this city of bones, he must learn their names.

So the next morning he made his way to the hospital. Certain
architectures that were grandiose from the outside, expansive with columns and
fluted eaves, seemed cramped inside, doors locked, shut down. But the hospital,
which he entered through a narrow archway, feathered into a labyrinth of shadowed
hallways and snug rooms. All that morning he wandered through halls thick with
bones, through rooms thick with bones, bones in places stacked like kindling, a
crackling carpet of bones he walked across, a wealth of bones. The halls were
so long and gently curving and mottled white he felt he was moving within
bones, within the ruins of a skeleton, itself filled with skeletons, and
perhaps within the bones at his feet other pilgrims wandered, restless marrow,
and tiny pilgrims within them. He wandered past strange intricate machinery,
all archaic now, post-historic, with knobs and levers like bones themselves
under dust, and the bashed eyes of lenses and on the walls garbled tentacles of
obsolete instruments. He passed weathered charts and lists of names, all faded
now. He pushed through ochered glass into surgeries, scalpels upright in jars
of rust, bones on the tables. In the wards, every bed was full of bones, as if
whole families had inhabited each mattress, and bones lay under the beds and in
the aisles, clipboards and stethoscopes among them. He passed by the pharmacy,
the pretty shapes of the bottles sidelit by a nearby window, all labels
nameless now, and the contents reduced to colored ash. He found in a dim
hallway, rolled in a corner, sequestered from the ravages of light and time, a
chart, which proved to be an exhaustively labeled etching of a skeleton. This
he carried back to the hotel and hung from a hook.

Then he sorted through the bones he’d gathered, matching them to the
drawing, inscribing each bone with its name in tiny cursive, sharpening the
pencil with a scalpel to achieve a point fine enough to write stapes, incus,
adumbrating the triquetral and trapezoid, barely sullying the ulna. The
skeletons in the room lacked some bones, even when he had searched under the
bed, under the wardrobe, in the folds of the mattress, so he ransacked the
bones in the hallway and on the stairs till he gathered what he needed, and by
nightfall a skeleton was laid before him, labeled, pieced from a dozen
skeletons. Two hundred and six bones in the body. The insects of the skeleton.
Stacked bumblebees of the spine. Butterfly pelvis, fat wasp tailbone, dragonfly
clavicle, nesting scarabs of the wrists. By candlelight he memorized the names
of the bones and their shapes, holding in his hand the distal phalanges,
touching the joined bones of the face and skull, handcuffing himself to the
pelvis, balancing ribs and clavicles on fingertips.

He’d not imagined the names so various, so mysteriously evocative.
Temporal bone, lunate bone, palatine bone, cuneiform bones. Talus and
trapezium. Sternum, sacrum, patella. Twenty-eight phalanges. The femur, with
its greater trochanter and condyles, the fibula and the vomer bone. The hyoid
bone of the throat. The calcaneus, the navicular and cuboid bones. The ossa
coxae, or innominate bones. He had never really looked at a skull, at its
curtains and folds, its ragged seams. The ripped gape of the nasal cavity, the
screens within the eyesockets, the bold angle of the jaw. Turning the skull he
had chosen, he heard the rattling of smaller bones within it, and the hiss of
sand gathering in the chambers.

The bones he had brought together had been variously weathered, some
erotically smooth, some rough as granite beneath his fingers. He handled each
one, weighing them, turning them. Lying in bed watching the candles gutter one
by one, then in darkness, his thoughts were crammed with the shapes of the
bones, curling into each other, floating wide on a field of darkness. He could
still feel their claws and nodules in his palms. He imagined, in the loosening
of images before sleep, laying the bones upon his body, rib to rib, metatarsals
and phalanges in place, cranium a diadem, a quilt of bones, imagined them
locking into his own bones, ghosting into them, or his own skeleton rising out
of his flesh.

He was not finished with the hospital. There were underground
chambers, lightless, he had not explored, so he took a stash of candles. The
room he sought lay in the bowels of the hospital, subterranean. He returned the
next day with candles, lost his way again, and finally found the thick metal
door, and behind it the machine, like a great scavenger bird hunched over the
table. Along the sides of this room, cabinets had burst and their contents,
black sheaves, lay in drifts across the floor. Anchoring candles at intervals
along the hall and the stairwell, he ferried armloads of the dark pages up into
the light: slippery bushels of thick opaque leaves. There were a number of old
satchels lying about, and he fetched the largest of these and stuffed it full,
then carried the x-rays back to the hotel and began holding them to the light.
He found he could slot them into the sashes of the windows, so he placed a
dozen at a time against the sky and sat on the mattress, looking at them. Such
unexpected beauty. The areas of darkness so deep, the grains of flesh and
organs like comets and asteroids, like galaxies and constellations, arcing,
bunching. The bones themselves were luminous, as if on fire, the flesh like ash
or dissolving salt, brushed into the dark.

He found himself at first obsessed with the bones, with naming them,
but then began peering for the flesh, for the vestiges of skin and heart, the
corona of face, halo around the starkness of the skull. Vertebrae like certain
orchids. Some of the x-rays took on strange semblances. A pelvis became a
domino, a foot an anvil, a hand a candelabra. Some seemed unblemished, but on
others he could see clearly the shattered bone, shards floating in the misty flesh,
splinters like snapped twigs, gray lines of less drastic fractures. He imagined
moving through the hospital, the city, clutching the x-rays, till he found
matches to the fractures, long healed now, or forever sundered. He had seen,
within certain wards, the bones still loosely cased in plaster, some tenuously
cohered by initial connective tissue. He had seen, as well, bones with the bark
of healing, splintered or cracked, but never rebroken in the same place. The
process of healing created a new inordinate sturdiness, it seemed, the bone
determined not to allow the same trauma twice. The body shoring itself up
against the future, against the repetitions of history.

Spending time with the bones, he found he could begin to read them.
Clothed though they had been within sinew, skin, they told their tales,
carrying only the stories of cataclysms, one or two to a skeleton. Sorting
through a heap of bones, he could draw forth the chipped finger bone, the
blemished patella, and imagine the stumble, the blow, that had left these
traces. Few skeletons lacked such markings, so the streets, the rooms, which
had seemed crowded, strewn with identical shapes, now proved, on finer
examination, to be varied and wonderful as a bookshelf. In his examination of
the bones some struck his fancy, and these he kept. Slender bones of children,
with their extra caches that fused in adults: the ilium, the ischium, the
sacral and coccygeal vertebrae, their unwelded skulls, so thin-walled. Bowed
bones of the aged. And among them the bones of cats and mice and ferrets, lean,
fragile, the tiny, marvelous skulls.

He could hardly have articulated why he walked through the streets
with one bone and not another. Shape, texture, weight, simply the snuggle of
its contours against his palm. The colors of the bones. They had weathered like
stones. Some yellow, some gray, some mottled brown, some granular white, bones
of ash, of salt. Sometimes he returned to the hotel laden, clutching armloads
of bones, like a forager returning with firewood, dumping them in a corner of
the room, sorting the bones in twilight, then candlelight. On inspection, some
ceased to compel him and these he tossed over the balcony, but others he could
not look at enough, he fit his palms against their hollows and swells, laid
them against his cheek, in the crook of his neck, touched them with his lips.
He spun clavicles on his fingertips like the narrow blades of a fan, beat time
on skulls with rib drumsticks, peered through the oval frames of pelvises,
wielded thighbones like sabers, candle flames washing like bright seaweed
beneath their sweep. He polished them with soft cloths and the oil of his
fingers, then arranged them, stacking bones in the corners of the room, in the
wardrobe, on the dresser. The arrangement of the bones was of constant concern
to him. Sometimes it seemed he had placed them correctly—their juxtapositions
and the pockets of darkness where they overlapped satisfying—but some nights he
would work long after darkness fell, beneath the fence of candles, struggling
to prod the bones into positions that pleased him, on which his eye would
linger.

He dreamed he was climbing a scaffold of bones, an enormous,
intricate skeleton, far higher than the lighthouse had ever been, inching up
the slope of the pelvis, hauling himself rung to rung of the plentiful ribs,
which gave slightly beneath each footstep, then in the crevices of the
vertebrae, finally into the echoing skull. He stood at last in an elliptical
window-frame, peering down across the bones he had climbed, which he saw now
were a constellation spread through all the sky, formed of every bone in the
city, each twinkling in its place. He woke from this dream exhilarated,
rejuvenated, and rushed out into the morning to gather more bones. His dream
had done away with choice, but, confronted with the bones on the streets, he
found he must sort through them laboriously, testing, hoarding, before he found
one that he could carry away. The bones did not stack easily. Trying to create
angular structures, cubes of bones, he discovered, was futile. They would slip
into each other, rasp across each other, jerking him awake, as if they were
only able to stand this discomfort for a short time, less than a night. So he
learned to allow them to find their own repose, nudging them till they nestled
into place. He tried for a while organizing them by kind, arm bones with arm
bones, middens of finger bones, skulls stacked like mottled melons, but this
proved both prosaic and disconcerting. The grouped skulls, even if he turned
their faces to the wall, tormented him with their cohesive presence, the
regularity of the stacked femurs was oppressive, like a gate, the slats of a
fence, so he strove for looser groupings. Skull cradled in pelvis, skulls
filled with the abraded marbles of metacarpals or the snapped sticks of
carpals, ribs canting over shinbones like slender birdcages, vertebrae cupped
in patellae like elaborate pastries, pairings of thighbones and ear bones,
calcaneous and hyoid bone—heel and throat meeting as they never did in life.
Scattering of toe bones in a shoulder blade. He labored for days in the empty
room, while the light changed, trying this bone and that, manipulating them,
striving for something, he could not have said what, some shape, a shape not
only of bones but of the air they inhabited. The bones cast complicated shadows
across the floor and partway up one wall, shadows full of shapes of light. He
went back to his bedroom, which he saw now was a laboratory, a storeroom. He
woke at intervals all night, returning to the neighboring room to peer at the
ghostly forms in the moonlight, the worn light, bounced sun to moon to sea to
ceiling to bone. The next day he dismantled them and started over.