Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  There is no need to describe any of the dozens of others.

  But they lingered. Like a contamination.

  I carried them with me through the streets of Baghrada. Sat with them as I ate cold pork from a can. Took them to bed with me, where I could only bring myself to touch Midori's hip with my cheek and not my hand, pressing my stubbled face against the creamy warmth, above the bone, and I thought, This could be broken. For sport. They do that here.

  No, there's no need to describe any of the others.

  Just ask myself why the colonel had indicated that I, of all people, should understand the aesthetics of the work he did.

  Mind games, I told myself, played by an insane man who said his work was done for something that employed rats for its eyes. An evil man who collected and possibly even took the sort of pictures I'd always drawn the line at, said I would never shoot. Because I was so much better than he was, right?

  Which hadn't stopped me from looking at them.

  Every. Single. One.

  An insane and evil man who had somehow seen through me to my scar.

  *

  On the First Day of Destruction, it's anyone's guess how it really happened.

  But it's easy enough to imagine groups of short, squatty men cloaked in ragged furs they themselves had skinned, carrying crudely effective weapons they themselves had fashioned by firelight, with total absorption. The skirmish may have been over the fresh carcass of a giant antelope or bison, or a particularly inviting shelter.

  The one's hands and thick broken fingernails were stained with the ochers used to create lovingly detailed likenesses of their prey animals on cave walls. But as the cudgel, fired to a hardness near stone, smashed the other's skull into splinters and sent him pitching to the ground, this was nothing like hunting, where lives were taken with an attitude that approached reverence.

  It's easy enough to imagine him looking down at the bloodied brains oozing into the dirt, breath gusting like the wind through his broad nostrils, and muttering whatever was his word for good.

  *

  Beneath Seattle's rains, in the loft where I sometimes live, sometimes work, and sometimes just stare at the walls, they hang from a line stretched between a shelf and a nail. They hang not like laundry but like snakeskins, clipped at the top and weighted at the bottom to thwart their stubborn tendency to curl.

  For those who shoot pictures where the people are shooting each other, there are two categories of work. There are the photos snapped quick and dirty, often digital, sent in for immediate consumption. Then there are the ones we save for later, time capsules preserved in rolls of film; their colors are richer, their shadows starker; we tell ourselves they mean more, that they'll be around longer. That some of them may even be remembered.

  As I lift the magnifier to one eye, like a monocle, and lean in close to scan negatives along the wet dangling strips, each one is a surprise, a treat.

  I may have developed them, but not one of them is my own. Instead, as I see for the first time what she saw there, I'm peering through her eye.

  I see the faces of Baghrada, their rare smiles and their frequent tears. I see the very definition of squalor, throughout a city and a countryside and a populace laid to waste. I see myself on a rooftop far from home, and how she really saw me, and I wonder how she ever could've loved someone so marked by his years and how they were spent, then wonder why she couldn't have loved me just a little more.

  I wonder, too, if it's my imagination, or if I really can see better than I used to; if it's true what I've always heard about sensory compensation. Total deafness in one ear, eighty percent in the other—that should be enough to earn a kickback.

  It seems important that I should preserve those last things I did hear clearly. That I should be able to press a button and replay them, if only in my mind…and I suppose I can, it's just that I'd gladly give up that last monaural twenty percent to be rid of them.

  Laughter. I can still remember the laughter, and how it drew us.

  She'd made arrangements to head out the next morning on a trip to one of the rape camps, liberated but with many of the women still there, because now it was an impromptu field hospital. With the colonel's picturebook still so fresh in mind, I wanted to ask her not to go, but knew what an insult this would be.

  The Red Cross is there, I told myself. She'll be fine.

  Laughter.

  As we walked near the hotel, it came from a block away, or two. We stopped, because hearing that sound was like seeing the sun again in a world of night. We'd heard so little laughter since coming to Baghrada. Better still, it was the laughter of children, lots of them. Anything that was causing this much joy, in this place, was cause for us to run, to immortalize it before it could disappear.

  And at first, as we came upon them, it seemed so normal. Just a group of boys at play in the middle of the street, laughing and cheering during a spirited game of soccer. The same scene was probably going on at that same moment in Berlin and Madrid and Dublin and Chicago, places that knew peace…but if it could still be found here, then to me that meant there was hope. There was light.

  We shot and advanced, shot and advanced, together, but Midori was the first to see, through all the flashing legs and kicking feet, that their ball had a face and a beard and broken teeth.

  I find it easy to blame them now, for everything. That if we hadn't sought them out, then we wouldn't have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. That if we hadn't been so transfixed by their laughter, then the reason for its sudden cruel turn, we might've noticed moments or minutes earlier some sound warning us that Codrescu's army had launched its counteroffensive against the city they'd lost.

  Laughter, and the shrill airy whistle of an approaching artillery shell—these are the sounds I remember last.

  From then on it's mostly imagery, a few sensations. Boys, and pieces of boys, flying through the air. A sick whirling weightlessness as I flew too. The taste of the street and the wet warmth of blood down one side of my neck as it ran from my right ear. A thickened isolation caused by an almost total absence of sound, the world closing in like a muffling blanket.

  Take it, she told me when I found her. Just lips to be read, movements that vaguely matched a hazy muddle of sound at my left. You're bleeding. Wasting neither time nor words, because how could either of us have forgotten her request on the hotel roof? Take it now.

  But to do that, I would've first had to let her go.

  *

  In the legacy of which I've inadvertently become curator, it is the last picture on the last roll:

  Midori lying in the rubble, with an arm reaching into frame from the left to cup her cheek. My arm, but it could be anyone's, and that's all that matters. It was unthinkable to me that anyone should get the idea she died alone. Technically the photo is an abysmal failure, marred by a cracked and dirty lens. The world, I think, will excuse these flaws…even if it's now a poorer place for her absence.

  And so, back to the original conundrum:

  Can any one photo come close to capturing the symphony of ruin that is the city of Baghrada?

  There is one, but it exists only in my mind, because neither Doolan nor the Barnetts nor anyone else was there to take it:

  A man kneeling in a street, calm and poised even though he's surrounded by carnage and chaos. He can manage that because, like a priest administering Last Rites, he has a purpose. You see him only from the back, and even less of the body he kneels beside—an older child or a small woman. They, too, could be anybody, and the ambiguities are important. They are far from the first to be brought to this moment.

  But it's the background that really makes the shot: the rising black plumes of smoke in which some might see cruel faces, the shadowy corners where rats scurry for a better view, and all around, a jagged still-life of walls and roofs whose devastation might even be called beautiful. So tragic, made as though by a master artist turned vandal, who in despair has turned against his own epic painting.r />
  We are not only the brush strokes upon his canvas, the scene seems to say.

  We are also the bristles of his brush, and the edge along his blade.

  IF I SHOULD WAKE BEFORE I DIE

  My writing this can only be regarded as a tremendous act of faith. That I believe you will not only live to be born and see the world outside my belly, but that you’ll reach an age when you can read this cumulative letter and understand what a miracle all of that will have been.

  And I don’t use the word miracle lightly. Used to, I was the type to roll my eyes whenever I heard prospective parents talk of their fertilized egg as being something miraculous. Cause for rejoicing, sure. But a miracle? It just didn’t seem to qualify. It’s the most natural thing in the world, something that happens somewhere every moment of every day. But then, that goes back to something said by Albert Einstein (and you’d better have studied him in school by now!): that we can live as if nothing is a miracle, or as if everything is. OK, so you got me there. Still, I don’t think I felt any different about pregnancy-as-miracle even after the doctor confirmed what the drugstore test kit and I already knew.

  But times change, my little one. In ways we can’t possibly foresee.

  We’ll have to continue this later. It’s morning, and I have to get things together for school, and don’t take this personally, because I thought we were past all of this months ago, but you’re making me sick.

  *

  Today was bad. But maybe now you’ll better understand why I’m frightened enough to need this ongoing show of faith that soon I will see your beautiful squalling face.

  Like most people, I’ve made a habit of not looking up. Sure, the sky could fall—but in my experience most of the things you really have to worry about live at ground level, so that’s where you keep your eyes. Just by being watchful, I’ve thwarted two muggings in the past year alone, me and my trusty canister of pepper spray.

  But this afternoon I looked up…had to, my attention drawn by the sight of deflated balloons high in some oaks, a splash of color against the slate sky and stark branches, their tiny buds struggling against the ice after a false spring. Helium-filled runaways, let go by the careless hands of children during some function or other on the grounds of St. Mark’s. I walk past the place twice each weekday, to and from school. It’s the most peaceful route I can find, keeps me away from the busier streets and the incessant traffic noise that seems impossible to escape when you just want to think. So the balloons caught my eye, hanging before twin bell towers that, if you must know, preside over the crack dealers and prostitutes two streets over. Hanging up there, they made me think of souls lost halfway to heaven.

  They were the only reason I saw the girl before she jumped.

  She stood in one of the high, narrow openings near the top of the closer tower, portals through which the bells peal each Sunday to call whatever flock remains. All I saw was a pale face and an indistinct body framed by rough grey stone. When she nudged one foot into empty space, at first I thought she was only reckless.

  Our eyes met then, I think—she did seem to look down in my direction. So was this her cue to jump? To do it before anyone could try talking her out of it? I took it that way, but then (not to speak ill of your grandparents) I was born and raised for guilt.

  No scream, from either of us. It was a remarkably quiet death. I stared at her all the way down, past seventy-odd feet of stone. She didn’t thrash, and even seemed to fall in slow motion. I barely heard the impact over the traffic two streets over.

  Maybe she lived for a moment, or maybe not. Certainly there was no life left by the time I reached her. Kneeling beside her hip, I tried to ignore the blood seeping from the back of her skull onto the walkway. Her face, fragile and young, looked oddly peaceful and resolved, her eyes half-open.

  I put one hand on her belly—flat, definitely flatter than mine right now, but the skin felt slack and loose, as recently deflated as one of those balloons overhead. For me, it was as good as a signed suicide note. There was no baby in a crib somewhere. It lay like wax in a fresh little grave. Or worse, if she’d miscarried early enough, it became hospital waste, incinerated with wrappings and tumors.

  “I’m so sorry for you,” I told her. “I felt like doing this too, after I lost mine.”

  So few of you seem to make it out of the third trimester these days.

  The hand I held must have been cold even before death, and didn’t squeeze back.

  And to be totally honest with you, I still can’t say whether or not I would’ve given in to my despair had it not been for you. You and I may have lost your twin, but because you’d hung in there and survived, I knew there was something yet to live for.

  *

  I told about the jumper at group tonight, to a rapt and silent audience. At group, it goes without saying: We’ve all been up in that bell tower. If only for a few moments, we’ve all looked down and stuck a foot into empty space. All of the women, and maybe a few of the men, too, the guys who haven’t been too stoic to admit they need the support of strangers after their hopes for fatherhood came unexpectedly slithering out in an ill-formed mass from between the thighs of their wives and girlfriends.

  I’m very aware that I’m sometimes describing things in a way that no mom should describe them to her child, at any age…but why sugarcoat it? Along with love and care, I owe you truth: You’re struggling for life in a perilous time, just as I’m struggling to maintain hope.

  About the jumper, a woman named Danika said, “Ain’t nobody should die alone that way. Did you get to her in time?” Danika’s been coming to group for a month. “Did she say anything at the end?”

  “Just barely,” I told her, and in the silence of our borrowed classroom you could hear the slightest creak. “She asked me to forgive her. Because she knew it was wrong. I know I don’t look anything like a nun, but maybe she thought I was from the church.”

  We’d all stood in the balance and wavered, then chosen life.

  But for some, I suspect that the debate still isn’t entirely settled.

  Doesn’t that alone justify the lie?

  *

  Group—ah, yes. What seems so thoroughly a part of my life right now will, I hope, by the time you’re reading this, be just a distant memory.

  Citywide, these past months, support groups have become a way of life, a spontaneous network arising to meet a growing need. They meet in church basements, in classrooms, in fraternal halls and civic centers. Their attendees drink lots of coffee and smoke lots of cigarettes, because now, for them, there’s no reason not to. They find themselves in the heartbreaking position of suddenly having no unborn to think of.

  Except for me. Even in groups bound together to survive losses that we don’t understand, I don’t entirely fit in. If any other woman out there is in my position, lucky enough to still be carrying a surviving twin, I haven’t heard of her.

  How else to describe what’s going on but as a wave of spontaneous abortions? Pregnancies failing first by the handful, then by the dozens, an epidemic that cuts across all ethnic groups, all income levels, that reaches into urban and suburban wombs alike. It continues to stymie the Department of Public Health as much today as after that first spike in the miscarriage rate…which I was part of, dismally enough. The Centers for Disease Control is here, but has yet to find any evidence of a disease to control. Nothing in the water, nothing in the air, nothing in the tissues scraped for tests. No genetic abnormalities in a thousand sperm samples; no toxins contaminating the food supply. Or, should I say, nothing worse than usual, still within the “safe” levels allowed by law—but I am thinking of you, trying to eat organic whenever I can afford it.

  I started attending group on the north side while staying with my parents after the miscarriage that robbed us of your brother. At the time, it was a way to get out of the house for a couple hours to escape my parents’ habit of tiptoeing around me as if I were china poised to shatter.

  Except that first
group was just as bad, in its own way. Yes, they all knew how I felt. I knew how all of them felt. We understood one another…to a point. But I wasn’t one of them, not anymore, if ever, and they knew it. Knew it in my clothes, my hair. I imagine they thought I’d just strayed into the wrong neighborhood, with no idea that I remembered what it was like to grow up among them.

  You’d think that a thing like a plague of miscarriages would be enough to tear down the walls of pretense, to let us at least see eye to eye on our shared tragedies. You’d think our differences wouldn’t matter, but they did. Oh, the others were polite enough. They’re often polite. But as we traded tales of sorrow and struggle, I couldn’t help but notice an undercurrent of judgment, so many of these inwardly sneering women seeming to believe that they had lost so much more. My child would have had potential, they might as well have said. What would your child have been but an eventual burden on the rest of us?

  I hadn’t told them about you, you see. I wasn’t showing as much then as I am now. So I’m glad I hadn’t said anything about you, because while they could pass judgment on me all they wanted, how dare they judge you. How dare they think they know you, your future, your dreams and your determination. By the time you’re reading these pages, I hope I’ve told you this so often it’s running out of your ears, but here it is for the very first time: You can be anything you want to be. Me, I’m working on it. I know there are plenty of people who’d say that if all I am at this stage in my life is an underpaid teacher and unwed mother, then I haven’t exactly set the world on fire.

  To that, I’d just say that it seems to burn quite well on its own.

  So. While I didn’t like this particular group, I found the idea of a support group in general to be very therapeutic, and found the fit much better much closer to home. Where we meet isn’t nearly as nice—of course not. It’s a classroom in a public school, one district over from where I teach. The paint may peel and the ceiling tiles may have huge brown water stains, but from the moment I walked in, I could tell that nobody was going to care if in my off-hours I still had a stubborn streak or two about totally outgrowing the aesthetics of my malcontented youth.