Good Bones (6 page)

They have their angers. They have their despair, which washes over them like grey ink, blanking them out, leaving them immobile, in metal kitchen chairs, beside closed windows, looking out at the brick walls of deserted factories, for years and years. Yet nothing is with them; it keeps faith with them, and from it they bring back messages:

Hurt
, they say, and suddenly their bodies hurt again, like real bodies.
Death
, they say, making the word sound like the backwash of a wave. Their bodies die, and waver, and turn to mist. And yet they can exist in two worlds at once: lost in the earth or eaten by flames, and here. In this room, when you re-say them, in their own words.

But why do women like them? Not
like
, I mean to say:
adore
. (Remember, that despite everything, despite all I have told you, the rusted cars, the greasy wardrobes, the lack of breakfasts, the hopelessness, remain the same.)

Because if they can say their own bodies, they could say yours also. Because they could say
skin
as if it meant something, not only to them but to you. Because one night, when the snow is falling and the moon is blotted out, they could put their empty hands, their hands filled with poverty, their beggar’s hands, on your body, and bless it, and tell you it is made of light.

T
HIS IS A
story told by our ancestors, and those before them. It is not just a story, but something they once did, and at last there is proof.

Those who are to go must prepare first. They must be strong and well nourished and they must possess also a sense of purpose, a faith, a determination to persevere to the end, because the way is long and arduous and there are many dangers.

At the right time they gather together in the appointed place. Here there is much confusion and milling around, as yet there is no order, no groups of sworn companions have separated themselves from the rest. The atmosphere is tense, anticipation stirs among them, and now, before some are ready, the adventure has been launched. Through the dark tunnel, faintly lit with lurid gleams of reddish light, shoots the intrepid band, how many I cannot say; only that there are many: a band now, for all are headed in the same direction. The safety of the home country falls behind, the sea between is crossed more quickly than you can think, and now they are in alien territory, a tropical estuary with many coves and hidden bays. The water is salt, the vegetation Amazonian, the land ahead shrouded and obscure, thickened with fog. Monstrous animals, or are they fish, lurk here, pouncing upon
the stragglers, slaying many. Others are lost, and wander until they weaken and perish in misery.

Now the way narrows, and those who have survived have reached the gate. It is shut, but they try one password and then another, and look! the gate has softened, melted, turned to jelly, and they pass through. Magic still works; an unseen force is on their side. Another tunnel; here they must crowd together, swimming upstream, between shores curving and fluid as lava, helping one another. Only together can they succeed.

(You may think I’m talking about male bonding, or war, but no: half of these are female, and they swim and help and sacrifice their lives in the same way as the rest.)

And now there is a widening out, and the night sky arches above them, or are we in outer space and all the rocket movies you’ve ever seen? It’s still warm, whatever, and the team, its number sadly diminished, forges onward, driven by what? Greed for treasure, desire for a new home, worlds to conquer, a raid on an enemy citadel, a quest for the Grail? Now it is each alone, and the mission becomes a race which only one may win, as, ahead of them, vast and luminous, the longed-for, the loved planet swims into view, like a moon, a sun, an image of God, round and perfect. A target.

Farewell, my comrades, my sisters! You have died that I may live! I alone will enter the garden, while you must wilt and shrivel in outer darkness. So saying – and you know, because now this is less like a story than a memory – the victorious one reaches the immense perimeter and is engulfed in the soft pink atmosphere of paradise, sinks, enters, casts the imprisoning skin of the self, merges, disappears … and the world slowly explodes, doubles, revolves, changes forever, and there, in the desert heaven, shines a fresh-laid star, exile and promised land in one, harbinger of a new order, a new birth, possibly holy; and the animals will be named again.

H
ERE COMES THE
future, rolling towards us like a meteorite, a satellite, a giant iron snowball, a two-ton truck in the wrong lane, careering downhill with broken brakes, and whose fault is it? No time to think about that. Blink and it’s here.

How round, how firm, how fully packed is this future! How man-made! What wonders it contains, especially for those who can afford it! They are the elect, and by their fruits ye shall know them. Their fruits are strawberries and dwarf plums and grapes, things that can be grown beside the hydroponic vegetables and the toxin-absorbent ornamentals, in relatively little space. Space is at a premium, living space that is. All space that is not living space is considered dead.

Living space is under the stately pleasure dome, the work-and-leisure dome, the transparent bubble-dome that keeps out the deadly cosmic rays and the rain of sulphuric acid and the air which is no longer. No longer air, I mean. You can look out, of course: watch the sun, red at all times of day, rise across the raw rock and shifting sands, travel across the raw rock and shifting sands, set across the raw rock and shifting sands. The light effects are something.

But breathing is out of the question. That’s a thing you have to do in here, and the richer you are the better you do it.
Penthouse costs a bundle; steerage is cramped, and believe me it stinks. Well, as they say, there’s only so much to go around, and it wouldn’t do if everyone got the same. No incentive then, to perform the necessary work, make the necessary sacrifices, inch your way up, to where the pale-pink strawberries and the pale-yellow carrots are believed, still, to grow.

What else is eaten? Well, there are no more hamburgers. Cows take up too much room. Chickens and rabbits are still cultivated, here and there; they breed quickly and they’re small. Rats, of course, on the lower levels, if you can catch them. Think of the earth as an eighteenth-century ship, with stowaways but no destination.

And no fish, needless to say. None left in all that dirty water sloshing around in the oceans and through the remains of what used to be New York. If you’re really loaded you can go diving there, for your vacation. Travel by airlock. Plunge into the romance of a bygone age. But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. No more street crime. Think of it as a plus.

Back to the topic of food, which will always be of interest. What will we have for dinner? Is it wall-to-wall bean sprouts? Apart from the pallid garnishes and the chicken-hearted horsd’oeuvres, what’s the main protein?

Think of the earth as a nineteenth-century lifeboat, adrift in the open sea, with castaways but no rescuers. After a while you run out of food, you run out of water. You run out of everything but your fellow passengers.

Why be squeamish? Let’s just say we’ve learned the hard way about waste. Or let’s say we all make our little contribution to the general welfare, in the end.

It’s done by computer. For every birth there must be a death. Everything’s ground up, naturally. Nothing you might
recognize, such as fingers. Think of the earth as a hard stone ball, scraped clean of life. There are benefits: no more mosquitoes, no bird poop on your car. The bright side is a survival tool. So look on it.

I’m being unnecessarily brutal, you say. Too blunt, too graphic. You want things to go on the way they are, five square meals a day, new plastic toys, the wheels of the economy oiled and spinning, payday as usual, the smoke going up the chimney just the same. You don’t like this future.

You don’t like this future? Switch it off. Order another. Return to sender.

I
N MY
previous life I was a bat.

If you find previous lives amusing or unlikely, you are not a serious person. Consider: a great many people believe in them, and if sanity is a general consensus about the content of reality, who are you to disagree?

Consider also: previous lives have entered the world of commerce. Money can be made from them.
You were Cleopatra, you were a Flemish Duke, you were a Druid priestess
, and money changes hands. If the stock market exists, so must previous lives.

In the previous-life market, there is not such a great demand for Peruvian ditch-diggers as there is for Cleopatra; or for Indian latrine-cleaners, or for 1952 housewives living in California split-levels. Similarly, not many of us choose to remember our lives as vultures, spiders or rodents, but some of us do. The fortunate few. Conventional wisdom has it that reincarnation as an animal is a punishment for past sins, but perhaps it is a reward instead. At least a resting place. An interlude of grace.

Bats have a few things to put up with, but they do not inflict. When they kill, they kill without mercy, but without hate. They are immune from the curse of pity. They never gloat.

I have recurring nightmares.

In one of them, I am clinging to the ceiling of a summer cottage while a red-faced man in white shorts and a white V-necked T-shirt jumps up and down, hitting at me with a tennis racquet. There are cedar rafters up here, and sticky flypapers attached with tacks, dangling like toxic seaweeds. I look down at the man’s face, foreshortened and sweating, the eyes bulging and blue, the mouth emitting furious noise, rising up like a marine float, sinking again, rising as if on a swell of air.

The air itself is muggy, the sun is sinking; there will be a thunderstorm. A woman is shrieking, “My hair! My hair!” and someone else is calling, “Anthea! Bring the stepladder!” All I want is to get out through the hole in the screen, but that will take some concentration and it’s hard in this din of voices, they interfere with my sonar. There is a smell of dirty bathmats – it’s his breath, the breath that comes out from every pore, the breath of the monster. I will be lucky to get out of this alive.

In another nightmare I am winging my way – flittering, I suppose you’d call it – through the clean-washed demi-light before dawn. This is a desert. The yuccas are in bloom, and I have been gorging myself on their juices and pollen. I’m heading to my home, to my home cave, where it will be cool during the burnout of day and there will be the sound of water trickling through limestone, coating the rock with a glistening hush, with the moistness of new mushrooms, and the other bats will chirp and rustle and doze until night unfurls again and makes the hot sky tender for us.

But when I reach the entrance to the cave, it is sealed over. It’s blocked in. Who can have done this?

I vibrate my wings, sniffing blind as a dazzled moth over the hard surface. In a short time the sun will rise like a balloon
on fire and I will be blasted with its glare, shrivelled to a few small bones.

Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing?

For some of us, the mythologies are different.

I became aware of the nature of my previous life gradually, not only through dreams but through scraps of memory, through hints, through odd moments of recognition.

There was my preference for the subtleties of dawn and dusk, as opposed to the vulgar blaring hour of high noon. There was my déjà vu experience in the Carlsbad Caverns – surely I had been there before, long before, before they put in the pastel spotlights and the cute names for stalactites and the underground restaurant where you can combine claustrophobia and indigestion and then take the elevator to get back out.

There was also my dislike for headfuls of human hair, so like nets or the tendrils of poisonous jellyfish: I feared entanglements. No real bat would ever suck the blood of necks. The neck is too near the hair. Even the vampire bat will target a hairless extremity: by choice a toe, resembling as it does the teat of a cow.