Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  “And when that Day comes, the instant the last sin is committed, an angel will lift a golden trumpet to its lips and blow a blast that will shake the earth beneath our feet and rip the sky open over our heads.”

  He would smile at her, brimming with an understanding of the universe that to Lynette seemed impossible to acquire. She would wish he could come home earlier, the way he used to, instead of staying at work so late.

  “Doesn’t that sound fun?” he would ask.

  Lynette would tell him yes, because it was obvious that was what he wanted to hear. She’d had her doubts, though, and had for a long time, because of one of the full-color paintings in her picture Bible. It didn’t say anything about a clock, but showed what could only be the Day of Days: an open field of grass, with the background trees blocked out by the bottom few steps of a stairway made of clouds and marble, bathed in golden light streaming from a source beyond the top of the page, and stepping into view on the uppermost stairs was a gigantic sandaled foot emerging from beneath a golden-hemmed white robe.

  She’d always been too ashamed to admit that she had nightmares about that foot, and the giant it was attached to. She dreamed of being crushed beneath it because how could anyone that big, no matter how good his intentions might be, pay attention to where he was going? Worse, nothing that big could resist throwing its weight around. She imagined, too, the face of the giant, snarling with rage and snorting fire past its beard and grimacing with teeth the size of tombstones.

  But during those unsettled days before the even more unsettled days of the divorce, her father recited the story enough times that she decided he was right—the Day of Days was going to be excellent. She felt sorry for anyone who didn’t look forward to it this way, privy to the secrets of clocks and countdowns.

  “Does Mom know this story?” she asked one night.

  At first, her father looked uncertain how to answer. “I’ve told her.”

  “She doesn’t believe it. Does she?” Lynette said, because, as young as she was, she still knew that saying what he couldn’t was the nicest thing she could do for him.

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “Does it matter?” Thinking of one of her luckier friends from school, with a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Even if Lynette didn’t understand why, she knew they weren’t supposed to get along. Yet somehow they did.

  “Yeah. It matters a lot.”

  “Oh,” she whispered, because his face said so much more. He knew things, and they made him sad. “Do Gina and Naomi know the story?”

  Now he smiled. “I’ll let you know once they slow down long enough to listen.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Because when you know something like this that most people don’t,” he said, “you feel an obligation to hurry things along.”

  “To make the clock run faster, you mean.”

  “That’s my bright girl,” he said, bursting with pride. “Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  *

  The next night after his demise, they dispensed with Jarvis according to his wishes. He had no funeral other than a memorial service at the tower, because for years he’d had no life beyond it, although after Lynette delivered her eulogy, the event took a sour turn. She found it tacky that the Deacons would pay their respects by using the occasion to warn against distortions of Hédonistes creed. She hadn’t realized this was a problem, or even could be. Sin seemed like such a laissez-faire pursuit.

  Apparently its wages were the sticking point.

  “’We drink damnation unto ourselves so the Kingdom might come to others that much sooner,’“ one of the Deacons scolded from the lectern. “To lie about that is more than a sin. It’s heresy.”

  Would her father have approved of this hijacking of his farewell? She had no idea. It might have offended his pride. Or it could’ve been his idea.

  She was at least confident that Jarvis hadn’t wanted burial. Even if they’d found a coffin to fit him, interment would have been a waste of good land. Such a body as he’d made for himself was best burned.

  One of their local business holdings was a crematorium in Pasadena, and there they trucked him, late, long after regular hours. Lynette rode next to him, resting one hand on the crate’s lid. In most ways he’d ceased to be a father years ago, forsaking one family for another, and while she had chosen to follow him there, the old rules no longer applied. He’d been less father than mentor, and in his last years an object of reverence for his stamina in pursuit of Gluttony. But in that respect he belonged to everybody, to Hédonistes the world over, and not just her alone.

  At the crematorium, the conveyor belt groaned and creaked under the weight of him, and the oven seemed filled with him, like a risen loaf. The flames fed on the great fatty mass of him in death as ravenously as he’d fed on everything else in life.

  Hours later she was still awake, and met the dawn from her cramped back yard, its air light and clean with the fragrance of oranges. She stirred the powder and gravel of Jarvis’s ashes as though they would reveal evidence of what she’d done with the knife. In her quest for excellence in all things, she spent a few moments pondering how she might have wielded the blade better: how she could have cut him deeper, how she might have spared him pain.

  And where was he now?

  We drink damnation unto ourselves so the Kingdom might come to others that much sooner.

  This was how she’d always known that Les Hédonistes were serious. They painted no rosy afterlives for themselves. As Martyrs for the good of all, they had chosen lives of unrepentance. You could never be a repentant sinner if you were resolved to keep doing it again and again. So they promised no eternal rewards. In their vision of forever, they existed far from the right hand of God.

  She looked to the sky. You wouldn’t really do that to us, would you?

  And while the sky was silent, she at least felt the comforting presence of a great watchful eye, taking notice of her sincerity and doubt.

  *

  On the weekend, she drove up to Glendale, the first time she’d seen Gina’s home in three years. She’d scarcely seen Gina in the interim, come to think of it, although the occasions blurred together. Her sister wasn’t prone to changes, with a preference for Volvos and her hair trimmed short, two shades lighter than natural, and she usually wore an expression of mild anxiety, as though trying to figure out the next to last thing you’d just said.

  Lynette stood at the door holding the urn, feeling as though she’d brought a housewarming gift.

  “Is that…all of him in there?” Gina asked after peeking. “It seems like there should be more.”

  Lynette found this funny for reasons she could never share. Gina remembered their father when he was merely obese. No good could come of updating her on that.

  “Most of him,” Lynette said. “I kept a little for myself. But I thought you’d be in the best position to share. You know, if Mom wanted some —“

  Gina cut her off with a sharp laugh. “I wouldn’t count on that.”

  “Or Naomi, if she ever… Or maybe she has, for all I know. Has she ever…?”

  “No. Last number I had on her, it’s somebody else’s now who’s never heard of her.”

  Gina told her that she looked good, and Lynette nodded, knowing it was true. It had been years since she’d ascended past the second level, the Arrogants, but you didn’t leave Pride behind. You carried it onward into all you did, a foundational sin that helped perfect the rest. The Sloth of a novitiate may have been incompatible with Greed, her current indulgence, but Pride was always useful.

  Gina set the urn inside, on a table in the entry hall, but didn’t invite her in, and instead stepped out and steered her along the walkway circling the house as though she’d intended to go for a stroll all along.

  Most likely, Gina didn’t want her around Theo, her husband, who worked in films as an Art Director. His Prius was parked on their circular drive, rather than in the garage, so it seemed obvious he
not only wasn’t away on set somewhere, but was home right now. Off limits, apparently, to the younger, prettier sister whose life was devoted to sin. A man could be stolen by a woman like that, for a night or a month or for years.

  The location made for pleasant walking, at least, their home built on a long, wide ledge of rocky plateau up in the hills, and overlooking downtown Glendale. A path of asymmetrical stones led past trees bursting with lemons and oranges, and avocados so big they looked as if they aspired to be footballs.

  “You knew him best. You knew him the longest, in a way. Which is a weird thing to say, since you’re the youngest.” Gina appeared to be groping toward whatever she really wanted to say, without necessarily wanting the answer. “Did Dad ever have any regrets about what he did to us…as a family? Ever?”

  “What do you want me to say? Mom gave him a choice between her and his expression of faith. It was an unfair position to put him in, and when he followed his conscience, you and Naomi took sides.”

  “Like you didn’t? You just took the other one.”

  “For the same reasons he did. When it’s something you believe in, you can’t just break down when somebody gives you an ultimatum.”

  “Even when it means you can’t believe in your own family?”

  “When your family doesn’t believe in you either, something’s got to give, doesn’t it?”

  With a groan, Gina let her shoulders sag with the weight of worlds. “He did such a number on your head. When are you going to see? It isn’t a religion. It’s not even a denomination. It’s a sex club for brainwashed workaholics, followed by an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

  Lynette tuned her out, gazing off and away, past red tile rooftops below, and pale blue pools nobody was using, and far beyond, palm trees and sprawl under hazy brown air, floating between the enclosing hills like scum on a pond. With a view like this, it was easy to return to silly childhood nightmares, imagining that giant foot of Christ Returned stepping down from the clouds into the middle of the chaos, a Jesus with the city-crushing stature of a Japanese movie monster.

  She’d never been able to concoct a satisfactory scenario as to how the Day of Days would really happen, that wouldn’t seem as ludicrous as the Giant Holy Foot. Some events were more powerful for what remained unseen. She dared imagine herself as one of God’s wise angels, entrusted with the job of staging and production design. Global meteor showers, she would advise. Unprecedented atmospheric conditions, with eerie yellow skies by day and Northern Lights by night, but visible everywhere. Cataclysms, too, as long as they happened in the right places.

  Off to the south stood the tallest buildings L.A. had to offer, and it seemed wrong that she couldn’t see their tower from here. It should’ve risen above everything else for miles and miles, the way the zariahs had in the old days. Instead, just like the six others spanning the country, from Los Angeles to Boston, and the rest throughout the world, it was an unassuming eight floors: a neutral ground floor, and one for each hierarchy. It blended, looking like any other unambitious office building, and that was the problem. Cathedrals still got all the glory.

  “I’ve got to go,” Lynette said. “Look, your ambivalence is obvious. Do you really want the ashes or don’t you?”

  If Gina gave it any more thought, she did it quickly, with a sharp exhale that tightened into a smirking smile. “Why don’t I get them for you. He was your father. For me he was just the sperm donor.”

  Push her—the impulse shot through Lynette as bright as a comet, her sister standing less than three feet from the edge of the plateau, with just enough of a gap in the bushes. Maybe her neck would catch and break in the fork of a lime tree down the slope. Maybe she would smash across the red tiles of the lower neighbors. Push her.

  “Let’s get the urn, then,” she said instead.

  Because she couldn’t see Dad approving, in spite of everything, even if he might think her a clever girl for making a cell phone video of the act, and bringing it back as evidence of a more suitable expression of Wrath.

  *

  Forgive her, Father, Lynette prayed while taking the freeways home. For she knows not what the fuck she’s talking about sometimes.

  Sex club—the misunderstanding was common enough that it was one of the first warnings the Deacons gave novitiates: that few people could understand how sex, even when performed in such ways and configurations as to be flagrant sins, might still be consecrated by its intent, and thus transubstantiated into an act of holy disobedience.

  It was understood that even when novitiates joined for all the wrong reasons, merely with an eye toward the seventh floor and what went on there, by the time they worked their way up to the level of Fornicant, they’d attained a level of enlightenment that elevated them above the carnal beasts they might appear to be. Their motivations occupied a higher plane, and while desires were satiated, it was not for desire’s own sake.

  It was even said that the purest of them, upon advancing to Fornicant after years of abnegation and work, were driven by the sudden shock of ecstasy to experience visions of heavenly realms.

  She looked forward to finding out.

  The path was simple, but strict. Devout newcomers joined at the level of the Indolent, indulging the sin of Sloth for a year and a day, living on a small stipend, on the second floor if they wished. They produced nothing, did nothing, taking a time-out from the world to clear their heads of the old lives they were leaving behind, and learning how acts they used to shun could be turned to God’s glory.

  She was too young to remember it, but according to Gina, the rest of the family thought Dad’s year of unemployment was just a turn of bad luck.

  With minds cleansed, Indolents graduated to Arrogants, encouraged to rebuild a newborn Pride. Next came the grade of Covetant, and Envy, as the believer’s attention was directed back out into the world, to focus on whatever they desired, to take it when possible, and to undergo training in Les Hédonistes’ secular businesses. In this way they were primed for Greed, managing centuries’ worth of wealth, using as their inspiration Jesus’s parable of the servants entrusted by their master with talents to turn into greater funds.

  For five years she had excelled at this. It was long enough.

  Wrath was different, a gateway level, and not to be indulged for any period of time. Most often it was a single act, which might or might not serve Hédonistes purposes—they weren’t without enemies. If the act was judged to have been committed with sufficient purity of emotion and intent, it served as a rite of passage, opening the doors to the seventh floor, the domain of the Fornicants.

  But even the most committed sinners could grow tired of a carnal paradise…or at least exhausted by it. For them there was the top floor and the rank of Glutton. Nothing was denied them that was within Les Hédonistes’ power to obtain, and, at their whim, they could indulge any and all appetites from the ranks below. It was their right.

  What better reward for a life spent turning the Clock closer to the Day of Days?

  *

  Where most men would pace, Hannigan was prone to pursing his lips around the breath pipe of his wheelchair and scooting it a foot or two forward, a foot or two back. He did it without thinking, or seemed to, but this time she was afraid someone would think he did it to attract attention, and wander over to have a picture taken with him.

  “You’re not the first. Wrath is what most people have trouble with,” he said. “You’d think it would be getting motivated again after a year of doing nothing, but we don’t often see that. Surprise, huh? But when you believe, you’re eager to contribute in a less passive role.”

  When she’d called to schedule a meeting with him, as her spiritual counselor, he’d told her when and where. He’d chosen the Babylonian-themed plaza at Hollywood and Highland where out-of-work actors—at least she assumed that’s what they had to be—dressed as movie characters and charged per pose. It was bubble-headed tourist kitsch, and made her skin crawl.

  “The most deli
ghtful thing I ever saw was right here.” Hannigan spoke around the straw. “A crabby Snow White on her break. She was sitting on a plastic milk crate with her dress hiked up out of the way, poor thing, smoking a cigarette and gulping down a can of beer. That stained purity…I thought it captured our essence so well.”

  Thirty feet away, pudgy people with cameras were eyeing him as if trying to figure out who he was supposed to be. Maybe that wheelchair-bound detective she remembered from childhood TV. Or the mutant leader from the X-Men movies, although Hannigan had most of his hair.

  “I keep coming back hoping to see something so perfect again,” he said. “Or Snow White herself—even better. But I’ve never seen her again. I think I want to offer her a new life.”

  And if his motives were less than pure, then…tick-tock. He couldn’t lose. Even if he never touched her, the girl’s progression would become his theater.

  With a sigh, he tongued the pipe away from his mouth. “Wrath is more than simple anger,” he said. “It implies an act of retribution—deep, savage vengeance. Old Testament-scale vengeance. This isn’t easy when you have love in your heart…and what we do, we do out of love. Many find it impossible to resolve the conflict between Wrath and Christ’s admonitions for forgiveness.