by Sarah Hall
Oh, I worried over all this. The white bone in my hand now had huge significance. It carried the weight of many emotions. In the bright beach glare it had what the local hippie chicks would call an aura. A pale but powerful aura. The aura of a handsome kind man who’d suffered a violent death.
I continued my walk while I thought about what to do. And I decided I wanted to keep the white thigh bone. I wanted to treasure the memory of poor Russell Monaghetti. I wanted to be able to look at the femur and recall his smile and the gift mojitos and the hibiscus on the bingo table.
I had no pockets and the bone was too cumbersome to carry, so I placed it on a patch of dry sand securely far from the water, and jammed a driftwood branch into the ground to mark the spot. I’d pick it up on my way back.
Of course, as I trudged along I started feeling guilty about Don. I had no treasured souvenirs of poor Don (I’d given his cricketers’ and politicians’ memoirs to the Rotary market stall). All I had were his clothes hanging in his side of the wardrobe, getting musty and moth-holed, but with his smell just faintly on them. Jackets and sweaters I was too sentimental to give to the op-shop. His Rockport walkers growing mould. The palm-tree board shorts the hospital gave back to me.
How would Don feel about me having another man’s thigh bone on the mantelpiece? Because already that’s where I was imagining putting Russell’s femur – over the fireplace, mounted on a little stand like the gold brackets that held Don’s brass telescope. (Yes, on that very same telescope stand.) With its pale aura gleaming out into the room, through the windows and out to sea.
I felt strangely unfaithful and wicked for most of the walk, but young and reckless as well, almost like a teenager. My brain was fizzing with excitement. Sorry, Don.
I picked up the pace on my way back. I was hurrying along the shore to pick up the bone to take home. I reached the spot I’d marked with the driftwood branch but the marker was gone. The tide was still fairly low but obviously a contrary set of waves had swept over the patch of sand, scooped it clean of debris, left it smooth and bare as a table-top, swamped it so recently that air bubbles were still popping on its surface.
That’s not unusual, of course. Waves and tides and winds seem irregular forces of nature, erratic in their evenness, but there’s always a proper reason for their existence, like Cyclone Sharon being caused by rapidly warming seas.
I understand all that. I’m an old North Coast girl. I see this every day. More than anyone I understand the way Dr Pacific does things. So I waded into the sea, into that shallow green dip between the shore break and the shore itself, and the bone was lying on the sea bed, rolling back and forth in the tide. Quite easy to find, being so pale.
GEORGE AND ELIZABETH
Ben Marcus
When George’s father died, he neglected to tell his therapist, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, except she could cop a mood, and she knew how to punish him with a vicious show of boredom.
He’d been deep in a session with her, maintaining that when he was younger he had discovered that there was no difference, in bed, between men and women. Literally. At the biological level. If you could wrap a present, you could make one into the other. And therefore this issue of preference had weirdly become moot. You didn’t have to check either box.
‘Have you ever worked with clay?’ he asked her. ‘Have you ever pushed pudding around in your bowl?’
George gestured to show what he meant. Spoon work, a bit of charade knitting.
Dr Graco waved for him to get on with it.
It was finally, he explained, just a shame that there were no other categories he could sample.
‘So you feel incapable of surprise at the sexual level?’ she asked.
‘I’m sure there are things out there I haven’t tried, but in the end they belong to categories that have washed out for me. Just, you know, haircuts I’ve already had, beards I’ve already worn. There’s too much time left on the clock. I wish that I had paced myself.’
‘Paced yourself?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is it a race?’
‘Yes. I just got my number. I should have pinned it to my shirt. Sorry about that.’
‘You don’t take this seriously, do you?’
‘Well . . . I pay you to take it seriously. Which gives me room to deflect and joke about it and put my insecurities on display, which you should know how to decode and use in your treatment. Another layer of evidence for your salt box.’
‘Do you often think about how I conduct your treatment, as you call it?’
George sighed.
‘I thought about it once, and then I died,’ he said. ‘I bled out.’
And boom, the session was over. He was in the waiting room putting on his coat before he remembered his news, what he’d been so determined to tell her, but he had to deal with the ovoid white noise machine which turned speech into mush, and the miserable young man waiting his turn who refused to ever acknowledge George when he burst out of his appointment. It was all a bit exhausting. Were the two of them really supposed to pretend that they weren’t both paying Dr Graco to inhale their misery and exhibit a professional silence about it? And couldn’t they finally just unite in shame and even go sadly rut somewhere? Roll out their crusts against a building, even, or on the merry-go-round in Central Park?
Sex with sad people was something that could still deliver – in terms of sheer lethargy and awkwardness – but the demographics were stubborn. These people didn’t exactly come out to play very often. It wasn’t clear what bird call you were supposed to use. You practically had to go around knocking on doors. And then the whole thing could verge on coercion.
The news of his father’s death had come in yesterday from a laundromat. Or perhaps it was simply a place with loud machines and yelling in the background. Someone was on the other end of the phone asking if a Mr George was next of kin.
At first George was confused. ‘To what?’ he asked. The word ‘kin’ made him picture the Hare Krishna display, human beings going hairless and sleek as they evolved. As if a bald, aquiline man couldn’t swing a club and crush someone.
‘All the tenants do a next of kin. I just need to know if that’s you. Tenant name is . . . I can’t really read this writing, to be honest. I didn’t know this man. We have a lot of units.’
George very slowly said his father’s name.
‘That’s it. Check. And are you Mr George?’
George said he was. Whenever someone tried to pronounce his true last name, it sounded unspeakably vulgar.
‘I’m sorry to report your loss,’ the voice said.
Try not to report it to too many people, George thought. Cocksucker.
He guessed he knew he’d get a call like this one day, and he guessed he’d have to think about it for a while, because the initial impact felt mild, even irritating. He’d have to stick his head into the dirty, hot, self-satisfied state of California and try not to drown in smugness while he solved the problem of his father’s body, which he hadn’t particularly cared for when his father was alive. But what was most on his mind was this question of kin, and why they had not made another call first.
There was a sister, but she’d scored out of the family. It was hard to blame her. Better food, prettier people, sleeker interiors. George read about her now and then online. She’d achieved a kind of fame in the world of industrial materials. At some point she’d promoted her ridiculous middle name, Pattern, to pole position. Like Onan, maybe. Or Pelé. Her old name, Elizabeth, George figured, was holding her back, and in a way he saw her point, given the sheepish Elizabeths he’d privately failed to grant human status in college. Sleepwalkers, enablers, preposterously loyal friends. Pattern was a family name belonging to their great-grandmother, who lived on a brutally cold little island, and who, according to their mother, had made a sport of surviving terminal illnesses. Now George’s lovely sister Pattern, so many years later, was a person, a business, a philosophy, a crime. She did somethi
ng in aerospace. Or to it. Had his brilliant sister once said, in a Newsweek profile, that she wanted to ‘help people forget everything they thought they knew about the earth’? One such bit of hypnosis had apparently resulted in immense profits for her, the kind of money you get very paranoid about losing. She produced shimmering synthetic materials from terribly scarce natural resources – a kind of metal drapery that served as a ‘towel’ for drones – which meant Pattern was often photographed shaking hands with old people in robes on the tarmacs of the world, no doubt after administering shuddering hand jobs to them back on the air bus.
Well that wasn’t fair. Probably, George figured, her staff conducted proclivity research so that it could provide bespoke orgasms to these titans of industry, whose children Pattern was boiling down for parts, whose reefs, mines and caves her company was thoroughly hosing.
At home Pattern was probably submissive to a much older spouse, whose approach to gender was seasonal. Or maybe his sister wasn’t married? It was difficult to remember, really. Perhaps because he had probably never known? Perhaps because Pattern did not exactly speak to any of the old family? Ever?
Now, with Mother in a Ball jar and Dad finally passed, George was the last man standing. Or sitting, really. Sort of slumped at home in the mouth of his old, disgusting couch. Trying to figure out his travel plans and how exactly he could get the bereavement discount for his flight. Like what if they tested him at the gate with their grief wand and found out, with digital certainty, that he super sort of didn’t give a shit?
His most recent contact with his sister was an email from [email protected], back when her rare visits home were brokered by her staff, who would wait for their boss in a black-ops Winnebago out on the street. Ten years ago now? His mother was dead already, or still alive? At the time George wondered if Pattern couldn’t just send a mannequin to holiday meals in her place, its pockets stuffed with money. Maybe make it edible, the face carved from lamb meat, to deepen the catharsis when they gnashed it apart with their teeth. Anyway, wouldn’t his sister like to know that there was now one less person who might make a grab for her money? She could soften security at the compound, wherever she lived. Dad was dead. Probably she already knew. When you’re that wealthy, changes in your biological signature, such as the sudden omission of a patriarch, show up instantly on your live update. You blink in the high-resolution mirror at your reflection, notice no change whatsoever, and then move on with your day. Maybe she’d have her personal physicians test her for sadness later in the week, just to be sure.
The question now was how to fire off an email to his very important sister that would leapfrog her spam filter, which was probably a group of human people, arms linked, blocking unwanted communications to their elusive boss, who had possibly evolved into a smoke by now.
Simple was probably best. ‘Dear Pat,’ George wrote. ‘Mom and Dad have gone out and they are not coming back. It’s just you and me now. Finally we have this world to ourselves. P.S. Write back!’
George went to California to pack his father’s things, intending a full-force jettison into the dumpster. He’d only just started surveying the watery, one-bedroom apartment, where he could not picture his father standing, sitting, sleeping, or eating, mostly because he had trouble picturing his father at all, when a neighbour woman, worrisomely tall, came to be standing uninvited in the living room. He’d left the door open and cracked the windows so the breeze could do its work. Let the elements scrub this place free of his father. He needed candles, wind, a shaman. And on the subject of need: after sudden travel into blistering sunshine, he needed salty food to blow off in his mouth. He needed sex, if only with himself. Oh, to be alone with his laptop so he could leak a little cream onto his belly. Now there was a trespasser in his father’s home, suited up in business wear. It was enormously difficult to picture such people as babies. And yet one provided the courtesy anyway. An effort to relate. Their full maturation was even harder to summon. He was apparently to believe that, over time, these creatures, just nude little seals at first, would elongate and gain words. A layer of fur would cover them, with moist parts, and teeth, and huge pockets for gathering money. Was there a website where the corporate Ichabods of the world showed off their waterworks, gave each other rubdowns and whispered pillow talk in an invented language? Perhaps a new category beckoned.
‘Oh my god. You can’t be George,’ the woman said.
George sort of shared her disbelief. He couldn’t be. The metaphysics were troubling, if you let them get to you. But day after day, with crushing regularity, he failed to prove otherwise.
The woman approached, her nose high. Examine the specimen, she possibly thought. Maybe draw its blood.
‘I can’t believe it!’
He asked if he could help her. Maybe she wanted to buy something, a relic of the dead man. The realtor had said that everything had to go. Take this house down to the bones.
So far, George was just picking at the skin. He was looking through his father’s takeout menus, skimming the man’s internet history. There were items of New Mexican pottery to destroy, shirts to try on.
Maybe he’d dress up like his father and take some selfies. Get the man online, if posthumously. If no one much liked him when he was alive, at least the fucker could get some likes in the after-life. Serious.
The woman remembered herself.
‘I’m Trish, Jim’s . . . you know.’
‘Uh huh,’ George said.
‘I won’t even pretend to think he might have told you about me,’ Trish said. ‘It’s not like we were married in any real official way. At least not yet.’
Oh god. A half wife.
The last time he spoke to his father – months ago now – George remembered not listening while his father said he had met someone, and that she – what was it? – provided the kind of service you didn’t really get paid for, or paid enough, because fuck this country! And that this new girlfriend was from somewhere unique, and George knew to act impressed. Certainly his dad had seemed very proud, as if he’d met someone important from another planet.
So details had been shared, just not absorbed. Would she tell George now that his father had really loved him? Pined and whatever, wished for phone calls, had the boy’s name on Google Alert?
‘Of course, Trish,’ George said, and then he smacked his forehead, ever so lightly, to let her know just what he thought of his forgetfulness. She deserved as much. They embraced, at a distance, as if his father’s body was stretched out between them. Then she stepped closer and really wrapped him up. He felt her breath go out of her as she collapsed against him.
George knew he was supposed to feel something. Emotional, sexual. Rage and sorrow and a little bit of predatory hunger. Even a deeper shade of indifference? History virtually demanded that the errant son, upon packing up his estranged and dead father’s belongings, would seek closure with the new, younger wife. Half wife. Some sort of circuitry demanded to be completed. He had an obligation.
It felt pretty good to hold her. She softened, but didn’t go boneless. He dropped his face into her neck. Lately he’d consorted with some hug-proof men and women. They hardened when he closed in. Their bones came out. Not this one. She knew what she was doing.
‘Well you sure don’t smell like your father,’ she said, breaking the hug. ‘And you don’t look like him. I mean at all.’
She laughed.
‘Oh I must,’ said George. He honestly didn’t know.
‘Nope. Trust me. I have seen that man up close. You are a very handsome young man.’
‘Thank you,’ said George.
‘I think I want to see some ID! I might have to cry foul!’
They met later for dinner at a taco garage on the beach. Their food arrived inside what looked like an industrial metal disc.
George dug in and wished it didn’t taste so ridiculously good.
‘Oh my god,’ he gushed.
It was sort of the problem with California, the un
embarrassed way it delivered pleasure. It backed you into a corner.
After dinner they walked on the beach and tried to talk about George’s father without shitting directly inside the man’s urn, which was probably still ember hot. George hadn’t unboxed it yet.
‘I loved him, I did. I’m sure of it,’ Trish said. ‘When all the anger finally went out of him there was something so sweet there.’
George pictured his father deflated like a pool toy, crumpled in a corner.
‘He called me by your mom’s name a lot. By mistake. Rina. Irene. Boy did he do that a lot.’
‘Oh, that must have been hard,’ said George. Who was Irene? he wondered. Had he ever met her? His mother’s name was Lydia.
‘No, I get it. He had a life before me. We weren’t babies. It’s just that I suppose I want to be happy, too. Which is really a radical idea, if you think about it,’ Trish said.
George thought about it, but he was tired and losing focus. He preferred a solitary loneliness to the kind he felt around other people. And this woman, Trish. Was she family to him now? Why did it feel like they were on a date?
‘It’s just that my happiness, what I needed to do to get it, threatened your father,’ continued Trish.
‘My father, threatened,’ George said. ‘But whatever could you mean?’
‘Oh I like you. You’re nothing like him.’
George took that in. It sounded fine, possibly true. He had no real way of knowing. He remembered his father’s new radio, which he had watched him build when he was a kid, and whose dial he twisted into static for hours and hours. He could make his dad laugh by pretending the static came from his mouth, lip-syncing it. He remembered how frightened his father had been in New York when he visited. George held his arm everywhere they went. It had irritated him terribly.
What else? His father made him tomato soup once. His father slapped him while he was brushing his teeth, sending a spray of toothpaste across the mirror.
George was probably supposed to splurge on memories now. He wasn’t sure he had the energy. Maybe the thing was to let the memories hurl back and cripple him, months or years from now. They needed time, wherever they were hiding, to build force, so that when they returned to smother him, he might never recover.
