Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  Viggo twitched. Without his notice, her soft little hand had crept into his trousers. Politely but firmly, he removed it now.

  “Well, he painted the girls here, at least.” Sweet Myrt sat back and blew at her yellow frizz, the very picture of irritated boredom. “Old Dixie took her business to San Antonio, and I ended up at Mother Askling’s, where it’s harder than ever to earn a dollar.” She stood up but was detained by a last question from Viggo.

  “Where is Mr. Albert Castle now?” He thought that this information might be of some use, at least.

  Prodded by a reproving stare from her current manager, Myrt stayed long enough to say, “I’ve no notion,” and then flounced over to to perch on the arm of a real customer’s chair. “Bill!” She exploded a kiss in his ear.

  Viggo paid for his whiskey and left. Out in the cold of early evening, he trudged toward the row of raw-lumbered flophouses that had sprung up in the fire’s wake. New snow balled up under his boot heels, so he had to stop periodically to scrape them.

  During one of these pauses, as he scrubbed his sole against the base of a gas lamp, a gleam in a shop window caught Viggo’s eye. In this town of so much silver, in a region of gold and turquoise and other fine things, there was something in the curve of this object that drew him closer. Pressing his nose against the pane, he saw a delicate silver box with three—three—Gud, three beautiful naked ladies entwined.

  Accustomed as he was now to spending time with whores, there was something in that particular nakedness that excited him. He thought perhaps it was because of his newly awakened sense of artistry, learned through contemplating the work of Albert Castle and Famke. Yes, with its graceful lines and luminous surface, that box was an object of real art.

  But just as suddenly as he’d noticed the box, he forgot all about it. Because in the rank just behind, catching a reflected glow from the many objects of silver, brass, and glazed porcelain, was a scrap that spoke to him even more intimately, even more importantly. It was about the size of his hand, brightly colored—just a flat bit of canvas pinned to a board. It featured a pair of serpentine white arms and a few locks of burnished red hair.

  That these elements were mere amputations, ancillary to the scrap’s main figure—a curvaceous blonde wearing only a helmet and a cloud about her hips—meant nothing to Viggo. He was familiar enough now with the work of A. C. to recognize one of his hallmarks, the figure of Famke he added whenever a composition required a ninth Muse or a background figure to give the beholder an impression of plenty. He even recognized the composition itself, a Hero’s Repose; for however Albert’s Valkyries might vary in the face, their bodies always assumed the same attitudes.

  This was clearly a wisp of what Viggo sought, and it was tattered enough to be within his grasp right now. He knocked on the door till the shopkeeper came to open it.

  “Just a bit of the wreckage,” the man explained, swiping at a grease-smeared mouth with his sleeve. Viggo had interrupted him at dinner. “Flotsam. Of interest for its connection to the fire, most likely, though the colors were fresh beneath the soot. I can show you something much bigger . . .”

  “This one,” Viggo said firmly, reaching for his left boot.

  Three dollars later, the piece was his. To the shopman’s amusement, Viggo untacked it from the board, rolled it carefully, and wrapped it in a clean handkerchief. It might be just a pair of arms and a long lock of hair, but Viggo thought them a very good likeness.

  Stethoscope, microscope, bacilli, tubercles. And now a new word—or rather, a word she had long known but only now was beginning to understand.

  Edouard Versailles had made it clear: That lovely, shimmering feeling, the one she had enjoyed occasionally in a faraway past and which left her wanting nothing but more of itself, was the feeling of hygiene.

  “It is another means of flushing, Miss Ophelia,” he explained as he unpacked his complicated machine from its red plush carrying case; “of letting the juices down, as it were, and eliminating the infelicitous bacilli. It is a practice that dates back to Soranus and Galen, who demonstrated in the second century a.d. that it frees the body of evil. But whereas earlier centuries were forced to entrust the process to manual manipulations or to unreliable jets of water, ours has the benefit of electricity—making the cure more precise, more clean, more—”

  He broke off, blushing as he looked at the patient in the bed. At this first use of his invention on a woman, Edouard felt an embarrassing hesitation, a shyness most unbecoming in a doctor, despite his carefully written and well-rehearsed explanation of this technique. True, a similar device had worked on himself to perfection, and he had modified it according to his collected anatomical drawings of women; he was as eager to see it at work as the patient was to achieve her cure—and yet for the moment he could hardly bear to look at either it or her, or to be looked at himself.

  “Leave us,” he said to the three Chinese maids who had lingered to await his bidding. They vanished like water into sand.

  Alone, Edouard dared a glance at the patient and saw that, mercifully, she seemed to have fallen asleep. The blue eyes were still, curtained by the paper-thin lids, and her body lay passive. For good measure, Edouard wove a few red locks over her face: a blindfold of Ophelia’s own making.

  He turned to the thing that waited at her bedside, squat and wide-bottomed, with a rubber handle on one side and, on the other, a bulbous node that suddenly reminded Edouard of a pig’s snout. His grand invention, a machine that would root out disease as a pig hunted truffles. He inserted the pronged plug into the wall’s current box—rubberized for safety, as his house’s metal ribs called for the most delicate precautions—and thought he heard it begin to hum, though he had not yet turned the switch.

  In a way, dismissing the maids made Edouard’s situation worse, for now he, himself, had to be the person who pulled back the sheets and gently separated Ophelia’s legs (nearly weightless, he noticed, though burning hot to the touch). He knew from his own experience that the most effective treatment occurred on bare skin, but he could not bring himself to peel away the thin nightdress. Instead he flipped the switch that engaged the current, and in the sudden deafening roar of it he guided the thing’s round black nose to the vee of the patient’s legs, where the buzz quieted. Much, he thought, as a baby’s crying quiets when presented with the breast.

  While the machine hummed, Edouard kept his eyes trained on the ceiling. The glass domes revealed a brilliant blue sky punctuated occasionally by a dry leaf or a bird’s leavings, disgusting marks he must have the servants wash away . . . He held the device steady and waited for nature and technology to take their course with Ophelia; tried to ignore the noise and concentrate on theories of disease. He recited the names of Dr. John Butler and Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville, whose masculine devices, powered by battery cells, had done him some initial good and provided the inspiration for the much more effective machine he tinkered into existence himself. He thought of the long, lonely hours in his office, the specimen jars and anatomical engravings eclipsed by wires and motor parts and electricity manuals, hours filled with happy expectation and occasional tests of the machine on his own anatomy. Could those have been the gladdest hours he would ever know as a medical man? For despite the excitement of this initial use, Edouard was finding the situation painful. Perhaps he should have limited the machine’s exercise to his own treatments. But no—again, such reserve would have been selfish.

  Edouard was too rapt in his own embarrassment to notice that when he applied the machine the patient’s eyes had flown suddenly open beneath their red blindfold. The vibrations in his arm were so strong that he did not sense, either, when her legs jerked and her body recoiled at the touch. In her frailty these movements were slight, and she brought them quickly under control, for despite the strangeness she found the treatment to be not unpleasant. She almost regretted that she had shut her eyes and ears to Edouard’s lengthy explanations, for she would have liked to understand what was happening
to her now. This strange noise and motion Down There—could they really be part of a cure that would clear her lungs? She closed her eyes again and—subtly, so her doctor would not notice—scooted down a little in the bed, until her anatomy ground more firmly against the machine. She remembered feeling a similar sensation in the past, and she wondered if there would be a correspondingly similar result.

  After some minutes the vibrations running through Edouard’s arm and across his chest began to weary him, and he wondered when the hygienic crisis would occur. Or could it be he’d made a mistake? Perhaps the device would not prove effective on the female anatomy? Perhaps the woman needed to be awake for the crisis to occur . . .

  All at once, his questions were answered and his doubts dispelled. He heard an involuntary cry break from Ophelia’s lips, and he looked down to see her whole body in a deep, prolonged shudder. Edouard sighed in relief, so heavily that he blew the red curls away from her eyes. Her face was revealed, and it was smiling, beautiful, looking up at him in happiness. Edouard turned away.

  To cover his embarrassment, he made much of removing the plug from its socket—it hiccoughed up a tiny orange spark—and replacing the machine in its case. He had already thought of one or two alterations he would like to make to the device, and he began sketching them out mentally as he coiled the cord.

  When he turned back to the bed to replace the sheet, he found Ophelia fully awake and watching him. He tried to assume a professional air. “That was your first hygienic treatment.”

  “Fanny,” she whispered, and he wondered if that were the name of some dear sister or friend she had lost. She was unlikely to say her own name at a moment such as this; but then, a crisis of any sort, whether physical or emotional, could spark memory as easily as it could induce amnesia.

  “Have you recollected something?” he asked dutifully.

  Her light eyes met his dark ones. “No.”

  Perhaps she was raving. In any event, the blue stare made him distinctly uncomfortable.

  “This evening,” he said briskly, snapping the locks on the case, “we may repeat the process; you shall have at least two treatments a day at first. But now you must rest.”

  “I am not tired,” she said, as if marveling at the fact of it.

  “Then I shall send Miss Pym with a draught.” He ran from the room—or would have done so, if it were not for the cumbersome burden of the machine.

  Chapter 42

  Southern California presents a most gloriously invigorating, tonic, and stimulating climate, very much superior to any thing I know of, the air is so pure and so much drier than at Mentone or elsewhere; and although it has those properties, it has a most soothing influence on the mucous membrane, even more so than the climate of Florida, and without the enervating effect of that.

  FRANCIS S. MILES, QTD. IN CHARLES NORDHOFF,

  CALIFORNIA: FOR HEALTH, PLEASURE, AND RESIDENCE

  Auntie Myrtice looked a right mess. Her hair had come loose from its braids and was soaked with her perspiration, sticking to her face and the pillow and to Mother’s and Alma’s fingers as they did things to her. They had tied her hands to the bedposts, and it must be her pulling against those ropes that made her perspire so. She’d pulled so hard that the blood was redistributing itself all over her body; her face was puffy and red around the handkerchief they’d stuffed in her mouth to stop her crying. And there was blood all over the bed, too. Probably Auntie Myrtice had vomited it up, the way Aunt Ursula used to do; for as Mother had explained that morning, Auntie Myrtice was very, very ill, and the little children must not come around to listen or watch at her door. That was why Miriam had hidden herself in this camphorous wardrobe, where her view was poor but at least she got some idea about what was happening. Too many people had disappeared from Miriam’s life recently; she would not go outside to play with her doll and let another person slip away.

  “. . . at a time like this,” she heard Alma mutter, much as Auntie Myrtice herself might have muttered; and Miriam knew her sister was thinking particularly about their father, who had been gone almost longer than she could remember. Alma sounded quite grown up; she had just turned fifteen.

  The last time they’d heard from Heber, he’d written from Nevada Territory, where he’d heard of a lady with red hair who was called Ursula. He’d gone up to the door of her shanty and scared her half to death, but she wasn’t their Ursula; she taught school and sewed shirts for extra money. Father wrote the story as if it were a terrible thing, but at the time, Miriam had laughed and laughed.

  “The Lord is testing us,” said Sariah now, curtly. “Now hold up that sheet.”

  Alma pulled the sheet off Myrtice’s feet, and Miriam couldn’t see what was happening down there. She did see her mother ducking under the sheet with a handful of what looked like the threads the little dead caterpillars had made last summer. It looked as if Sariah were going to spin a cocoon around herself or Aunt Myrtice or both, and then they would disappear together.

  “No!” Miriam burst from the wardrobe. “Don’t go in there!”

  Now, at last, Edouard Versailles knew what it was to be happy. Every time he checked Ophelia’s pulse and found it stronger, every time he weighed her and another pound registered on the dial, every time he studied her fluids under his microscope, he felt a pulse of feeling he could call by no other name. It was happiness when he treated her with his galvanic invention, when he saw her face flush and her body shudder; happiness when he charted the waning of her symptoms and, inverse to them, the waxing of her health and beauty. He was giving her the great gift of herself—and losing himself in the process, as a medical man should.

  He abandoned all other projects, including not just his father’s menagerie and his own collection of rare plants but also the architects and builders completing the Institute downmountain. How could he care about a new shipment of cot springs or beakers when a miracle was already underway in his own house? Much better to sit at Ophelia’s bedside and observe, with an attentiveness that might have seemed religious if Edouard had had any use for religion, the resurrection of her flesh. Just as he had prescribed, she brought all the juices down, and the results supported his theory beyond what even he might have asked. After an initial sluggishness due to dehydration, her body began flushing itself most efficiently, keeping the nurses and maids busy with the bedpans. Every day she had a bath in the foaming waters piped down from Hygeia Spring, and her skin seemed to drink it in and grow each day infinitesimally more supple, more luminous, more full of both life and liquid; with each revolution of the earth, her bones appeared a fraction less prominent, her hair a whisper’s breadth thicker. Soon her eyes stopped glittering with fever and shone instead with steady light; best of all, her cough retreated to the tops of her lungs, and the blood faded away until her spit cup often contained nothing more alarming than that of any other resident at the glass house. He taught her to breathe again, deeply and using each muscle in her body; and with practice her breath came more easily.

  There was but one element lacking to make her cure complete: her story. But he was convinced that it was a mere matter of time before she recovered her past and, with it, information that would help him understand why her body had become so susceptible to the deadly bacilli. With memory, as with physical hygiene, the cure would flourish, as he would at last be able to put to rest the mysterious demons that plagued her.

  “Have you recollected anything, Miss Ophelia?” he asked almost every day. “Perhaps in your sleep?”

  Sometimes she answered this question with a laugh; sometimes she shuddered and turned away. Occasionally she began to weep, so stormily that he feared she would do herself an injury; then he prescribed an extra dose of opiate in the broths and waters that the nurses brought.

  Fortunately, Edouard’s studies had shown opium was an integral and by no means unusual part of most cures for consumption, as it promoted sleep by cleansing and soothing the nerves. Doctors around the world had decided to dose their
most wretched patients with the stuff of deep dreams, and this was one method, at least, with which Edouard could find no fault. He himself had occasional recourse to the soothing pleasures of laudanum. Quietly, then, Miss Pym and the other nurses dissolved sticky balls of medicine into Ophelia’s food, and Ophelia slept. Under the opium, her dreams appeared to be vivid if not always agreeable; she murmured in them frequently and at length but never described what Edouard suspected must be nightmares. She said she could not put any of her dreams into words but that there were no useful memories in them.

  Most nights, Ophelia slept beautifully, reflected in the shiny glass walls; and she woke with ever greater energy. Thus, by the early months of 1886, she had become what Nurse Pym proudly called a handful. Much to her own surprise, Miss Pym had recognized that the electricity was of benefit to Famke. It helped the girl’s body to uncurl, to become more elastic, more capable of assuming the postures of good health. Witnessing this, Pym came to have faith in Mr. Versailles’s strange theory of hygiene and, even without his knowledge, to promote it subtly in the town below. She was grateful to be part of this wondrous new cure, and from time to time Famke discovered her kneeling on the floor, offering thanks up to God for the gift of modern medicine.

  The patient, however, had had enough of her bed; she was complaining of boredom and demanding to be allowed up. Edouard felt strongly about the restful component of his cure, and he would not allow her to rise from the pillows under her own locomotion, even to use the sparkling bathroom nearby; but he knew he was losing control of his patient. Her opiate dosage had reached a level he was reluctant to increase, and he began to cast about for some sort of gentle occupation for her; something not too taxing, for which the occasional drug-induced languor of her fingers would not be a hindrance.

  Seated at his great warped desk, Edouard sifted through the drawers where he kept his parents’ most treasured personal items. He had long ago boxed up his pious mother’s collection of prayer books and crucifixes—Edouard could not follow any creed that celebrated physical suffering—but he had collected more precious memento mori in brass coffers and faded velvet bags: locks of his mother’s dull auburn hair woven into bracelets, his father’s iron gray strands coiled inside rings and brooches—the jewelry he planned to give a wife if one ever found her way to his lonely mountain. He’d also had hair from both the elder Versailles twined into a wreath that he thought would look very fine atop a bridal veil. The Chinese maids sometimes jested, but always in quiet tones, that there was not a hair left on either head at rest in the miniature Taj Mahal.