Bone Dance

by Emma Bull

  But Theo’s mind was elsewhere. “We gotta do this on attitude,” he continued. “Think Mel Gibson in Monte Cristo.”

  “Sure. Could we also do it on paranoid willingness to hit anything that moves with the nearest heavy object?”

  “I’ve got no problem with that.”

  Theo, my patron saint may have killed your father. If so, I made it possible. I didn’t say it. It wouldn’t have helped.

  Theo stopped halfway down the hall and set his hand on a doorknob. He glanced up at me; for a moment I thought he’d speak. Then the moment was gone, and he opened the door.

  There was a lamp lit on the nightstand, and a bulky figure on the bed; there was the sound of harsh, irregular breathing. It was Albrecht, gray-skinned, slack-mouthed, aged by ten years, sick. But alive. Theo hunched over the bed as if looking for some microscopic, encouraging signal.

  I couldn’t find any resemblance between Theo and his father. Maybe he looked like his mother. That would be interesting, to be able to see your nose on someone else’s face, and know it was only the outward sign of an interior connection, a similarity in the blood. And the emotional connection: Was it different from friendship? What did Theo feel now? Would I feel the same, if it were Theo lying stricken on the bedspread?

  I heard something click to my right and looked up. Dusty, my nemesis from the Night Fair and the Underbridge, stood in the connecting door to the next room. He wore a knee-length black robe that was too big around for him, and his shell-pink hair was in disarray. I’d never seen him without the silvertones; his eyes were narrow and deep-set and very dark. He held a long-barreled pistol in both hands. “Hey,” he said, “it’s Sonnyboy and the Whatchacallit.”

  I stood very still at the foot of the bed. LeRoy’s injection and a bolt of fear combined to make a buzzing noise in my head. I waited for a sign from heaven.

  Theo hadn’t moved, either. His back was to the connecting door. Did he recognize — yes, he’d known Dusty as one of Tom Worecski’s henchmen. Theo’s eyes widened, and closed; his lips pressed tight, and his shoulders rose as he filled his lungs in a rush.

  “God damn it,” Theo said, heated and drawling, still facing the bed, “I thought I told you to watch him!”

  My teeth snapped closed, an involuntary motion. I knew that voice.

  Dusty’s head turned, just a little, and he frowned. “Boss?”

  Theo scowled over his shoulder. “What the fuck were you doin’? How long has he been like this?”

  There was a little of the bad truck driver from Rainbow Express in it, and some of Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. But it was mostly the voice of Tom Worecski. Monte Cristo, indeed, Theo. But it would only buy a few minutes, nothing else.

  “Like what?” said Dusty. He took a step closer, and the gun barrel wavered.

  “If he dies, I’m gonna have your ass for breakfast. Go call downstairs for a doctor.” Theo made a little business out of checking his father’s pulse. Careful, careful — the body language would be harder than doing the voice. But of course, that was why Theo hadn’t moved from the bedside.

  Dusty was still frowning. “What happened upstairs? And who’s that with you?”

  A muscle stood out in Theo’s jaw. “You gonna do what I tell you, or you gonna stay and chat?”

  It wasn’t quite right, and I thought Theo knew it. Did Dusty?

  He lowered the gun. “Sure thing, boss,” he said, and went out into the hall. Theo let his breath out.

  From the hallway door, I heard Dusty say softly, “Hey, Sonnyboy!” and I turned and saw him framed in the doorposts, sighting down the gun at Theo. I had just enough time to take the step that put me in the line of fire.

  I heard three shots as Theo knocked me down from behind. Dusty wavered in the doorway and dropped the gun. I saw his face, an interesting mix of bafflement and annoyance, before he fell into the hall and was still.

  Myra Kincaid now stood at the door to the next room. She wore a raincoat loosely belted over, I suspected, nothing, and her dark cherry hair fell untidily in her eyes. She looked relaxed, half awake, and held a pistol in a negligent grip, settling as I watched to point at the floor. Santos, I thought, with an upwelling of hysteria, where were they finding all these damned handguns?

  “My brother was a mad dog,” she said. “But I expect I’ll miss him, anyway.” She sounded appallingly like Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind. “Tom’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I said before Theo could perjure himself. I slid out from under him, and he sat up with a lurch. I got to my feet and managed not to sway too much. The pain in my shoulder was like a blunt-ended hammer that shook my whole body, and it felt as if adrenaline had raised blisters on my nerve endings. But all the while, my eyes never left Myra. The gun made her master of the room; she didn’t behave as if she knew it. “I hope you don’t feel you have to avenge him.”

  “If Tom couldn’t kill you, I surely couldn’t. Dusty, not being very bright, hadn’t figured that out.”

  Innocuous voice, but something out of alignment in it, in the very air. I looked into her eyes and knew she was a good deal more than half awake. Why had she just killed her brother? What was I supposed to say? Here was a cobra, out of her basket. What could I possibly play to make her dance?

  “Worecski’s gone,” I said at last, “and Albrecht’s finished. The market for bravos and assassins just dried up. Where will you go now?”

  Her eyelids lifted a fraction. “You’ll let me go?”

  Attitude, I thought, gathered mine around me, and replied, “I think you’d better.”

  “I want safe conduct.”

  Good grief, who did she think I was? What did she think was happening here? “Going fast will be just as effective. Never coming back will be even more so.”

  Myra shook her head and smiled. “I’ll do that. Honey, you haven’t got a clue, have you?”

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked with an effort.

  “That’s all right — it works anyway. But if I’d known you were one of hers, I wouldn’t have had shit to do with this. That was another thing Dusty wasn’t too bright about. ’Course, neither was Tom. I wonder what would have happened if I’d let Dusty pull that trigger.”

  I understood, at last. I was alive, and Tom was dead; so I must have killed him. If I could do that, I was too dangerous to challenge. Myra had given me her brother in exchange for her life, and was impressed by my mercy. I had a strong desire to go away and be sick. “You’d better leave now,” I said.

  She nodded and dropped the gun in a pocket of the raincoat. For a moment she froze, her hand in the pocket. Then she lifted her head. Her face seemed harder and older, and her lips were twisted and pouting, even as they smiled. Her eyes were rolled back and showed nothing but white.

  “Tell my fierce and virtuous sister,” said a dense, caressing contralto through Myra’s mouth, “that Pombagira sends her congratulations. And reminds her that she could not have done it without me.”

  Myra Kincaid and the spirit that rode her walked to the door, stepped over her dead brother’s legs, and was gone.

  “Sparrow?” said Theo shakily from his place on the floor. “If anything like this comes up again, let’s split town, okay?”

  “That’s a great idea. I wish you’d had it sooner.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked this time.”

  “You’re right.” I stumbled back against the bed and slid to the floor beside Theo. “Go tell Josh that as soon as he can spare the time from Frances, your father needs him. Hurry.”

  My eyes were closed, but I could feel him crouched beside me, looking into my face. “What about you?”

  “And when he’s done with everybody else, I could probably use a little help, too.”

  I heard him run down the hall. Good. The rush was for Albrecht, though; I could have told Theo that I was in no danger. The fierce and virtuous sister still had a use for me.

  Tom Worecski has his revenge, and a kind of temporary immortali
ty. It might have been different if there had been a body to stand over, dispose of, remember. And it might have been different if I hadn’t seen the endings of too many horror movies.

  But in my sleep I wait for the sequel. In my dreams my loved ones come close and I touch them, and his smile stretches their mouths, his voice comes out. Over and over. And when, awake, I see my loved ones, try as I will, I can’t seem to separate love from terror. It’s the perfect revenge. He would have been delighted.

  I don’t dream about flat white spaces and pictographic dancers. I don’t hear the voices of spirits. I don’t miss them. And I don’t fool myself into thinking they’re gone. I just haven’t fouled anything up badly enough to require their intervention, that’s all.

  I’ve written this at Sherrea’s request. Or is it a request when someone drops twenty-five pounds of manual typewriter and a monstrous pile of paper beside your plate at dinner, then asks if you’d rather do it in longhand?

  “Do what?” I said.

  “Your version of what happened to the power monopoly,” she told me, as if I ought to have known.

  It was, and is, a very large typewriter. Finally I asked, “Does it have to rhyme?”

  She said she wants a record of it for the Engineers, but I think she also means it to be therapy for me. Or maybe she doesn’t. But I’ve treated it as if it was; I’ve tried to faithfully reproduce the person who woke up on the river flats, and understand, and forgive. I’ve made progress on the first two.

  Even so, I think this must be three-quarters lying. I can’t have remembered everything; and the process of trying is like reconstructing a dream. You put the connective tissue in where it never existed, because without it, you’ve got, not a narrative, but a string of senseless images.

  I don’t trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff left on the sand when the tide of experience recedes. As long as they’re part of that process, there’s something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.

  But what if something exists only as a remembrance, that was never an experience? What if it even leaves artifacts in the mind: English, Spanish, French, and a thorough knowledge of semiconductor electronics? These, in me, began as pure memory, untroubled by life or the sensible continuity of time. The experience came later.

  What if Sleeping Beauty woke behind the briers alone, in the dark, to the knowledge that the curse was not sleep but waking, and that family, childhood, fairy godmothers and all were dreams spun to amuse a virgin mind in mothballs?

  She/he/it would have no choice but to make something of the awakening. I do, as best I can.

  Theo and I, in a rash moment over a flask of cherry brandy, resolved to restore the old municipal telephone system to replace Albrecht’s graft- and bribery-powered party lines. After three months of learning experiences, we have half an exchange up; but it’s interesting work.

  I found that Loretta, the old woman at China Black’s house, was right: communal hydro generators, regularly spaced along the riverbank, are a reasonably cheap and reliable method for getting power to most of the City. We have four running so far.

  Now that the power monopoly is broken, a surprising amount of photovoltaic technology is turning up. Surprising to me, anyway. Last week a storm took the roofing off a house on the south end of town and revealed three solar panels hidden in the rafters. I went down to direct the salvaging of them, and felt like an archaeologist who’d found the library at Alexandria intact.

  People come to me for things like that, and for information, and training. I’m learning to talk to them. I’m learning to live with being recognized on the street. A frightening number of people know who I am, and even what I am, and I have to get on with life as if that didn’t matter. Someday maybe it won’t.

  I said this was therapy. I think Sher wanted me to see that my life is not a finished story. I already know that, but maybe she doesn’t realize I do. Such a surprising number of people left alive at the end, our narrator included. Do they just stop then, suspended with one foot hanging in midair, one breath half drawn?

  “You may tell them,” Frances said, “that Little Nell lived.” She was lying on her back under the Hoodoo Engineers’ big tree, eyes closed, hands limp on the grass. I’d told her about writing this.

  “Oh, a tragedy,” I said.

  “And that as soon as Little Nell recovers from having her intestines shortened by an inch, she will be a much more interesting person, and it won’t be safe to say things like that.”

  “Or necessary, I suppose.”

  She raised her eyebrows and her eyelids at the same time.

  “I’d thought that you’d want to leave.”

  Frances looked up into the boughs and smiled. “Maybe. Eventually. But not until I run out of amusements. It should be damned amusing to be underfoot and in the way while you build the New Jerusalem. I want to write my name in the wet cement.”

  I look forward to that.

  I liked the idea of a Dickensian ending. But I don’t know yet who marries, who dies, who has offspring and how many. Theo’s father survived the stroke, but his health is uncertain; he’s as fragile as Frances and, unlike her, will remain so the rest of his life. I think he and Theo have said things to each other they weren’t used to saying, and that it did them both good; but I wasn’t there.

  I couldn’t say why Sherrea believes the story isn’t done. I know why I do. It’s because Myra Kincaid was right: I haven’t a clue. There is a whole class of answers to life’s big questions that, when examined closely, proves to be nothing but another set of questions. I now know my origins, body and soul. That’s like knowing that magnetic tape is iron oxide particles bonded to plastic film. Wonderful — now, what’s it/or? What does it do!

  It does, I suppose, what it has to. It does what it loves to do, or what needs doing. It helps others do the same. So I do that. And sometimes, lying on my back in an inch of cold water with a socket wrench in my hand, or teaching someone how to use a soldering iron, or constructing witty segues between songs on the balcony at the Underbridge, I can feel it, very close: the power and clarity and brilliance, the strength and lightness, that I had once in a dream, a dream of dancing, a hoodoo dream. Maybe in time — nine months? nine years? — I’ll finally have a clue.

  I’ve found a videotape, a home dub that someone kept, of several weeks’ worth of a TV comedy show. I like it. It’s funny. But my favorite part, the part I play at the Underbridge when the windows are colorless with dawn, when Theo has fallen asleep with his head on the mixing board, when Robby is marching up and down the dance floor with a broom on his shoulder, is the end of each one. Then the woman whose show it is walks out to her audience and the cameras in a ratty pink chenille bathrobe, grinning, and says, “Go home! Go home!”

  She’s made as much sense of the world as she can for one week. She hands it off to the audience. I love her then.

  Go home! Go home!

  And the house lights go up.

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