Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  Albert lay waiting on the faded Flower Garden, arrowing as if to pierce the moon. He was remembering an afternoon long ago during the Danish idyll, when Famke sat atop him and braced her arms against the ceiling, and he had begun the only real work he had ever finished. He did not look at Famke now until she climbed atop him once more, and she leaned forward until her hair fell about his face, blinding him in the darkness of a fragrant grotto. Lizzie Siddal Rossetti, he was thinking when she kissed him. Euphemia Ruskin Millais . . . Famke . . .

  Famke pressed the node to herself, and herself to him.

  It was an uneasy sensation, that of the woman upon him, around him, not only moving herself but also vellicating from some mysterious source deep within. At first it shocked Albert back into the moment, the room, the sense that he was an intruder in a strange man’s house—and then it produced a swell of feeling so overwhelming that he forgot everything else. He stiffened again and surrendered to the enigmatic pleasures of science.

  Holding him tight with hidden muscles, Famke looked down into Albert’s eyes and felt puzzled. He is hardly doing anything. Why does he simply lie there—like one of his own dead fish? She bounced against him and the device; jerked, wriggled, and realized, I know how to fix his paintings!

  Famke stopped moving, and the electric hum was loud in the room. When Albert twitched, she put a hand on his chest to quiet him. She thought of those painted sardines and of cottagers coming home, of train trips all over the West. They need . . . What was the word? The one used for music and machinery . . . rhythm.

  Almost unconsciously, she began to move again, but more slowly now. She thought that even a dead fish might coil around its neighbor, and the bodies could intertwine—not like Albert’s regimented Muses but like the tinderbox’s Graces—for the visual needed to have the same transformative thrust and vibration as the wheels of a train or the snout of a galvanic invention, and that rhythm should change as the feelings changed. In her mind she rearranged all his paintings again—she saw that she had butchered them before, but now she might make them better—or create new paintings, even outside the bounds of Muse or Valkyrie . . .

  She looked up and caught her own reflection in the glass wall. She tossed her head and she was Calafia, Gunnlod, Nimue; she was other women whose names Albert had never spoken. She rocked back and forth against the galvanic node, and she was the painter of Hygeia, with a vision to make greater pictures. In mounting excitement, she looked into her own blue eyes and then through them, beyond the glass. And thus, after three days and nights in which Albert had toyed with her wildness, only to leave it unsatisfied, Famke’s crisis began. Electric rhythm cast its spell, and her juices came down.

  As this happened, Famke shuddered and gasped, her face twisting into a mask. Albert had never seen such a thing before. It was alarming—disgusting. “Darling”—he shuddered, too—“really!” But she did not seem to hear.

  “Famke!” He reached up and grabbed her by the ribs, to shake that strange pulsing out of her. But that only made her begin to cough.

  It was all too much for Albert. He squirmed out from under her, letting her fall where she might. “The Devil!” he cried, staring as Famke continued to shudder and hack, spraying one wall with a fine red mist. The old impulse to dash overtook him.

  Albert ran for the door, hardly pausing to grab at his clothes on the way.

  When he was gone, Famke collected herself slowly. She had landed on the floor and felt a bruise beginning to form on her hip; but that was only a little pain, and did not bother her any more than the pain that had reignited in her lungs. Albert was gone, no doubt to hurtle down the road and release that awful tension that kept him from doing his best work. And yet, she thought as she straightened up and shuffled through scattered papers toward the still-humming galvanic device, she was not sorry. She did not miss him. He might run all the way back to the hotel and fetch his carpet-bag and take the next stage downmountain. He was welcome to go.

  She looked fondly down at the snouted machine, now radiating waves of heat as it chugged its magic into the empty air. This, perhaps, could be called hers, and she would take it with her wherever she chose to go next.

  Famke turned, admiring her reflection in the glass panes, and grabbed the galvanic device by the tail. She wanted to make a grand gesture, and Edouard had never warned her against this particular one. Still watching herself, she yanked hard on the snaky cord, to pull the stout plug from the wall.

  It was anchored fast. She dug in her heels and pulled again, much harder, and was pleased to see blue and orange sparks pouring from the wall as the machine gave way to her will.

  It was an astonishing sight, viewed from the forest below. First the shower of light within the room, crackling stars born when the cord separated from the stubborn plug. Then flames, as the carpet of thin paper and cloth gave itself greedily over to consumption. A luminous white body hopping up and down to stamp the fire, throwing a quilt to smother it.

  From outside it was clear that Grandmother’s Flower Garden swept the fire downward through the floor, where it wrapped itself around a steam pipe and began to lick at dry palm fronds and a faded armoire. Water played its part, too, as the sparks continued to pour from the steel rib and Famke ran to fill a bedpan from the sink. Thinking to douse the conflagration at its source, she flung the water toward the hemorrhaging outlet. But this angered the sparks; they crackled and jumped toward the ceiling, the mattress, the canvas shades. Then everything was on fire.

  A false dawn came up over the landscape. Smoke was already on the wind; in the cat house, a tiger and a panther screamed that they could smell it. The family of tusked deer streaked by, heading for higher ground. The zebras snorted and reared in place; one dashed himself against the stone wall, and the other ran into the stable, where she kicked down a stall door and huddled against one of Edouard’s black horses, which were out of their minds with terror. The baby zebra was too young to know she should run; she stood among the pine trees and trembled.

  Viggo, Myrtice, and Edouard walked right past her as they came through the forest, so close they might have run their fingers through her mane. They scarcely noticed her, however. At first they were delighted at the sight of the immense glass domes lit up like an Oriental lantern, illuminating the hillside—it was a marvel to Viggo and Myrtice, a glimpse of home to Edouard—and then alarmed when the light became too bright and they knew this was not the gentle lumens of the gas jets but the start of a fierce inferno. They saw a naked figure, a woman, beating her fists helplessly against the heavy glass, then bent over and coughing.

  Edouard began to run toward it, his lovely house, and then he stopped, as a fearful conviction occurred to him. He recognized Famke, his greatest achievement, prey to the lungs once more.

  Throw a stone, he thought. Break the glass; set her free. It was what she herself should have done; but she was obviously too overcome to think of it. Where are all the servants? Wong was back in the village with their bags, but the singsong sisters should have been protecting his home; perhaps they had gone to join Ancient Jade. Edouard searched the ground for rocks that might be big enough to do some good, and he came as close to the house as he dared. Every stone he threw fell short.

  Viggo put his arms around Myrtice’s waist and neck and held her in place. The protective gesture was wholly instinctual; he had eyes and mind only for Famke, whom he was seeing in the flesh for the first time in six years. She was lovely, with the smoke swirling around her and her red hair outshining the flames. And she was terrible; for it was clear what her fate, and the fate of any who tried to save her, would be. Nonetheless Viggo thrust Myrtice aside and ran past Edouard, nearly up to the house itself.

  Before he could reach it, the inevitable occurred. A tongue of flame found its way to the mouth of a gas pipe, and fire flew into the house’s inmost structure, consuming gas till there was nothing left within but flame. The infection could not be contained; it fevered the steel ribs, it bled through
the jets into the rooms, it swelled against the sealed glass, and finally it burst.

  For a moment, it was beautiful.

  All who witnessed the house’s destruction would remember it the rest of their lives. The memory would come to their minds when they thought of God or Satan, of the sublime or the supernatural. For in the instant that the house exploded, it shot its light forth in shivers of glass, sparkling brighter than diamonds, eclipsing the stars and the moon, sweeping through the air with a whistle that for a moment drowned the crackle of the flames. They speared a bird or two and showered the earth with deadly hail.

  Edouard ran to press himself against the far side of the Taj Mahal, hoping its walls would shield him. He cursed his own cowardliness and even, in the space of a heartbeat, sent up a prayer that he might change.

  Viggo’s heart was still bent on rescue. When he saw a body sail from the house into the trees, he turned as if he might catch it in his arms. Thus the flying slivers lodged in his back and shaved away a patch of scalp; forever after, he would look as if he had been in a savage massacre, but he would live.

  Myrtice, stopped among the trees, was safest. The net of needles and leaves above her caught the glass, and only the big shards fell through; one of them neatly severed the little zebra’s jugular, and the animal quietly sank to its knees. Myrtice wept for it as she had done for her own lost baby—until she saw that Viggo was injured, and then she could not stop herself from rushing to him. Without a thought for the danger, she ran out into the glass storm, and this time it was her arm that encircled him, her handkerchief that stanched his blood.

  In a very few moments, the glass panes were spent. But the implacable flames continued to gobble up the air, swallowing the very house itself. Soon the floors and furniture collapsed, and the fire spread over the ground in an orange blanket. Edouard fled the Taj Mahal while, with the glitter still piercing his back, Viggo abandoned Myrtice to run after the body he had seen flying.

  By now people were arriving from the village, the nurses and doctors and families of the sick, anyone able-bodied enough to fight a fire or tend the injured. They had broken down the gate and came with wagons and barrels of water, horses, medical supplies.

  “Halloo?” they shouted through the trees. “Mr. Versles? Survivors? Anyone?”

  But Viggo and Myrtice, Edouard, and even Albert—he had escaped the house, though without time to dress himself, and in his terror he had abandoned clothes and portfolio inside—were too busy to answer. Already they were searching the woods for Famke, shaking bushes and sometimes shouting, each according to his strength and feelings for her.

  “Famke, it is Viggo! I—” But even after all these miles, he could think of no more to say.

  “All is forgiven,” called Myrtice when he fell silent; she voiced it rather quietly, however, as she thought—unworthily—of what Famke’s disappearance might mean to her.

  Edouard had only one thing to say, and it cost no small effort: “Hygeia was a beautiful painting!”

  The fire snapped close behind them.

  In his nakedness, Albert was moving slowly, almost paralyzed with fear that glass would shred his skin and fire would catch him in a fatal clinch. He called, “Wherever you are, darling, don’t move! Do not move!”

  As he would discover, there was no way for Famke to move, for she was lying in pieces on the ground. When she landed, a thick glass sword had plunged through her chest, pinning her to the earth. More glass had cut away one foot and most of her fingers; fragments of her bones showed orange in the firelight. Part of an ear was missing, and the tip of her nose, and almost all the once-flaming, wild locks of hair.

  When the searchers first came upon her, all together, they drew up short, struck dumb by the picture before them. No one knew how to look upon it. Famke’s eyes were open and glazed, plainly sightless; yet there was a rasp coming from her chest that said she must still be alive.

  Bravely, Viggo seized the glass sword. The old scar tissue protected his fingers as he first pulled, but soon his blood mingled with hers. Myrtice cried out then and tried to swathe his hands with her petticoat. Seeing this, Albert realized how very naked he was, and he covered himself with both of his hands. He was ashamed in front of the others, especially Edouard Versailles. But Edouard did not notice Albert’s nakedness or Famke’s; he knew the ground’s softness meant it was soaked in blood, and he knelt to take Famke’s pulse.

  Famke was beyond caring about any of this. When her lungs were free of their burden, they released a wild, tired sigh. It is too bad, she thought dimly; just when I was ready to begin my life.

  A great bubble of blood formed through the hole in her breast and hovered there, growing hard and dark. The artist in Famke might have liked to see that, but her eyes remained fixed on the great sea of sky, and her red lips slowly stiffened, wordless. The three men and Myrtice watched to see if they would close entirely.

  And thus Famke Sommerfugl, a girl of good family, departed from the earth.

  EPILOGUE

  She is the West’s greatest artifact.

  “ART NOTES,”

  SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  We laid her out most beautifully,” remembered Albert. His expression was blank behind the smoked lenses, but he put a hand on the glass coffin in what the widow thought a tender, though somewhat horrible, caress. She fancied that his face and figure stood out against the stone walls like some medieval church figure of death, with black holes for eyes.

  From the next room came the sound of groaning and cracking wood, as the Chinese workers pried away the sides of the enormous crate. With the reverberations, the blue-gowned, white-skinned, rubber-limbed corpse shuddered in her tube of glass. Her lashes fluttered as if she were about to blink, and the widow felt faint.

  “She was fully embalmed,” elaborated the man from the widow’s own country. He, too, put a hand on the glass, and with the most delicate sympathy for what he knew must be the widow’s horror, he explained that every ounce of Famke’s blood had been replaced with formaldehyde, and the best quality arsenic was used. The blood drained for embalming Famke was now rusty red dust in an urn that sat atop the tombs in the Taj Mahal. In consultation with the Institute’s experienced morticians, Viggo himself had directed the procedure. “But as you see”—he indicated his gnarled paw, grotesque beside the blind man’s delicately gloved one—“after the glass storm, my hands were in no condition to do the fine work. They are good only for rough labor now.”

  “Then who is it who put her in this—this bottle?” the widow asked. Her eyes met his severely, with the look she would use to scold a servant or impose a penance.

  There was a long silence, as if the men were waiting for something. And in the end it came: One of the draperies at the back of the room twitched, then undulated, and a dark man in mourner’s black stepped from what turned out to be not a window recess but a small sitting area. This, she realized, must be Edouard Versailles, the art collector and amateur doctor himself.

  Without introduction, he said to her, “The idea of the bottle came at the funeral. We all agreed she was too lovely to put in the ground, and we pulled her from the coffin.” He stood gazing quietly down at the glass tube without touching it. The widow thought it odd that he did not look at her; but then, she realized, he had seen enough from behind his drapery.

  “Monsieur Versailles has a collection of specimens in jars,” Albert said. “They demonstrate that the body may last in alcohol for ten years, even twenty. I stitched her together myself,” he added proudly, “though it was no easy job. I shaped a fingertip into her nose.”

  “My finger.” Viggo showed her the stump with a modest air. “I had sliced it off in pulling the glass sword.”

  Against her will, but drawn by overpowering fascination, the widow bent to peer at that nose in profile. When she looked closely, it was indeed misshapen; but the stitches were nearly invisible, concealed with some sort of clay.

  “The foot is her own,” Albert elabor
ated, “but the fingers are of a girl, a lung patient, who died in the stagecoach before reaching Hygiene’s hospital. Monsieur Versailles thought of it, and the family was willing.”

  Edouard Versailles felt compelled to tell part of the story. Once Famke was dead, he explained, he had realized he did not loathe or even fear her: He—as he confessed in a dispassionate voice, oddly divorced from the setting—he loved her. As he held her body against his, he knew that Hermes’s story had been lies, that she had done no wrong but had been the angel in each house she had graced. That night, for the first time, he wept for someone other than his parents.

  He visited the Anteroom the next day—there was clearly no reason to bring Famke there, so she occupied a suite at the Springs Hotel—and begged the dead patient’s parents for use of her hands. Famke’s corpse must be perfect for the final viewing, as her body had been in life; he would pay any price to gaze on it in its youthful glory. In this way, the Thomas family from Vestal, New York, were able to assuage their own grief with a first-class Grand Tour of Europe. And when Edouard offered a reward for tresses of bright red hair that might be stitched into a wig, Hygeia Springs was fairly flooded with boxes and bags of the stuff. He selected the truest reds and paid each contributor as promised; several of the fair but frail retired on the proceeds and became schoolteachers, then wives.

  His story ended there, as if he expected the widow to make some comment—perhaps to approve of the prostitutes’ moral advancement. But for the moment she would say nothing.

  Viggo and Albert explained that several other great things had come to pass:

  Myrtice mailed a copy of the death certificate to the federal agents, who had Heber Goodhouse released and returned to his family. With rest and Sariah’s concentrated care, he regained much of his health and began to dream of ways for improving the life cycle of Chinese silkworms. After years of innovative husbandry, he succeeded in breeding a hardy new strain that he christened the Sommerfugl. It entered the Mormon record books as a miracle, and Prophet was renamed Heber City.