Three Moments of an Explosion (47 page)

“In some illuminated manuscripts,” he said, “you can tell why images are where they are relative to the text. And there are others in which whatever riotous assembly’s at the edges would probably have been more or less the same whatever the subject matter.” There was another sound from above, a creak like someone lowering himself to a hole. This time William was too deep in thought to notice. The girl, however, heard. She looked up startled as William continued. “For a while I thought that’s what I was looking at here. Essentially …” He hesitated. “Doodles. If of a most splendid kind. Marginalia. But …”

William pointed at curlicues in the crook of a rib. “See these marks,” he said. “They change very specifically. They grow
curvier
. What starts at one end of the bone as a set of relatively simple lines becomes virtuoso.

“You see that sort of thing all over. Developments. The same figure here—” one shin, “and here—” the side of the skull, “but with far more finesse above. There are plenty of these
improvements
.

“I think what are on these bones are experiments. Studies, references, preparations, the testing out of ideas. This skeleton’s been used to loosen up the wrist. Before the artist turns to the real project. Which will be who knows what? Not this man, and perhaps not Man at all.”

William looked at a paint-covered window. It glowed from light outside. He spoke quickly. “Perhaps in twenty years, some Norwegian ship’ll land, shall we say, a blue whale. And as the crew flense it, Gunnar Gunnarson will point: there, on an exposed corner of that great skull, will be carved a human figure. Life-sized. Perfect. Crosshatched more delicately even than the real thing. And there at last, under
that
flesh, will be the piece all this has been leading up to. And it’ll be so beautiful. And it’ll tell so astonishing a story. What would you say to that?” He smiled at the girl. “Scratched in the bones of a whale.”

The girl regarded him. “Our friend here?” he said. “And who knows who else?” He raised his hands at the door, at everyone in Glasgow. “Rough sketches, every one. What’s been done to this chap is what you do to such scraps when you’re done. You throw them away. So here we are.” He smiled again and his eyes filled. “In a waste bin.”

He was too agitated for even an adult observer easily to follow, let alone the girl. He stared at the bones.

“If we were to look under my skin or yours, what do you think we might find? There can’t be too many such people—one would have heard. But I find I can’t believe him unique. How many of us are scribbled on?

“I’ve considered, of course I have, uncovering a few inches.” He tapped his own shin. “But do you know? I find I cannot bear to discover if I am,
or
if I’m not.”

William raised a finger to his lips. The girl, solemn thing, copied him. She glanced at the ceiling again, but the noises from above had stopped. “If those who wear the design know they do,” he said, “whether they know why or what it portends, they obviously go to some lengths to avoid attention. Which would make
this
fellow here a serious oversight on their part. Who knows who they might send, what they might do to someone like me, who chanced on the knowledge? Best to keep what we know hush-hush. In case they’re a bad lot.

“After all, it’s always possible that the artist isn’t God, but the other party.”

The girl tried to steal a vertebra. William fished it out of her pocket in mock astonishment, as if chancing upon it like a fossil on a beach. “This is a wonderful specimen,” he said. “I must have this.” He told her he would buy it from her and gave her another shilling.

She paused at the door. “No’ a whale,” she said. “A wee mouse.”

“Yes. Yes!” William was delighted. “Why not?”

He watched her go. It might indeed be that rather than submerging to biblical deeps, the work for which this man was a draft scampered for crumbs. That one day a cat would catch it, and crunch down on filigree illustration so fine, so exquisite, it might only have been made out with microscopy of the mouse’s bones.

Given her age and situation, it seemed reasonable to assume that anything the girl might report would not be listened to. Later, though, hoping to move on to a new phase of life, I felt I had to seek, at considerable effort, the young woman she was by then. I did not know her name, and knew there was only a negligible chance that she remembered what she had seen. Nonetheless, after reflection, I became anxious at the thought that she might disclose any recollections she did have to some other interested persons, or indeed to any but me, and what attention that might bring.

William had grown paler even than the Scottish sky would warrant, and he was losing weight. I watched him scuttle into lectures late, strewing papers like a figure from a
Punch
cartoon.

“Can I speak candidly?” I asked him.

“Where do you stand on God?” he interrupted. His voice was strained. He spoke too quickly, as he had to the girl.

“On the crown of his celestial pate,” I said. It raised the desired smile, if fleetingly. “I come from what you might call nonconformist stock,” I said with care. “Am I a believer? I don’t detain myself with theology most of the time. But beliefs aren’t only in the brainpan: they’re in the body. We’re all issued beliefs and instructions by our backgrounds. Some implicit, some explicit.” I gave him a glance. “We’re all given orders.”

He was noticeably startled that I’d said such a thing. As was I. I was under some pressure, at the time.

“Of course, whether we obey those old injunctions or not is another matter,” I continued in a rush. “Sometimes we might surprise ourselves. Obedience comes with risks, just as disobedience does, and it seems one only risks what one is willing to lose. The chaps are all worried about you, you know. I’m worried about you.”

“It’s good of them,” William said. He cleared his throat. “Really there’s no need.”

“Nonsense,” I said. He was startled, but I would not make light of it. “Whatever you’re up to, it’s putting you in harm’s way. William, you
must
stop.”

He looked at me with those exhausted eyes and struggled to formulate something. “As regards Yahweh,” he said, “and related phenomena, perhaps
understanding’s
overrated. Some of us are observers by nature, not philosophers. What do you think?”

“I think,” I said slowly, in as light a tone as I could muster, “that I shall enjoy being a surgeon.” I looked away. “I’ve been won over by this knife-handed tinkering. One’s often surprised by what one ends up caring for.”

“Quite,” he said. I did not meet his eye. Eventually his attention shifted from me. I could almost see it go, back through the tenement streets by routes I could have walked, back to the secret that he had still not told me. I knew—I could tell—that he felt pursued.

The moment came. A typical gray day, a typical wind gusting in the alleys of that resilient city. It irked William ever after that he never knew what he had done to provoke suspicion, nor who it was who had given him up.

He was in his makeshift laboratory, with his bone journals, administering to the camera with which he inexpertly captured only strange and gloomy underlit images of the design. He would not risk buying the discretion of a professional photographer. There was a knock.

At the door were two officers of the law and a porter from the medical school. They gained entry easily enough while William remonstrated weakly. He stepped into the street as they investigated. He waited for them. Locals gathered. The little girl was not among them, but William’s landlord was. He looked up, above William’s head, into the upstairs window. He looked stricken with guilt. That this, William thought, had befallen his tenant under his supposed protection. When he had the man’s attention William gave him a nod of reassurance.

Over the years of our association I saw William perform many other laudable acts. I saw him save lives, of course; I saw him put frightened people at their ease in ways I assure you not every doctor bothers to do. But it was the homely scale of that unspoken intervention that struck me. That he not only took a moment but that moment, of his own undoing, to reassure a man he barely knew. It was difficult, to feel such admiration and yet be unable to express it.

On the floor by the skeleton were a small drill, tiny screws, adhesive paste, and wire. William had been boring minute holes in the bones. “I wouldn’t leave it all in bits,” William said to the porter. He held his hand up to indicate a brace like a gallows, from which he had intended the skeleton ultimately to hang. “Oh please, please,” he said. The constables bundled up the bones more roughly than he could bear.

To William’s astonishment, he was hauled in front of the university authorities rather than the police. Seven old men, provosts and heads of department and so forth, flapped their gowns and bellowed harsh questions. William was thinking about his parents, he told me later, about his imminent expulsion. He was thinking about the discards of a scrimshander. “And about you,” he added to me.

“What possible macabre pleasure,” Dr. Kelly demanded, “would you derive from making such carvings?”

“Oh.” William was startled. “I didn’t,” he started to say. “That wasn’t me. That skeleton …” He stopped, seeing the dean’s expression.

“This is a grisly business,” Kelly said, William told me,
fiercely
. “Moral your artistic proclivities are not, nor fitting for a physician, though I won’t deny the skill in them. They are, I will say it, unnatural. Now. Where did you procure your materials?”

William stared at him. “You would not end,” Kelly said slowly, “what has so far been a promising career with
illegality,
I am sure. So—where did you get those bones?” And William, openmouthed, took what he had been offered.

“I bought them, sir,” he said at last, firmly. “For my art.” He raised a hand and made a little etching motion. The dean sat back. The look on his face was one of relief.

William’s landlady told us that his rent was paid to the end of the following month, but that he had disappeared. Most of the class believed him sent down. Even I heard nothing from him. But two weeks after his questioning, utterly unexpectedly to almost everyone there, though not to me, William slipped quietly into the hall after a lecture had started.

The great wave of astonishment was muted by Professor Serge’s wrathful glance. Just once, after we had settled down, William looked up and found me. He gave me a huge smile, and held up a finger in assurance that he would explain.

After the lecture we all crowded around and clapped him on the back and demanded to hear the story. He grinned. “Oh, you know,” he said. “I was a silly ass. Got my wrist slapped. What did I miss?” and so on.

Out of earshot of the others he said to me, “They caught me fiddling around with stuff I shouldn’t have been. They found me with bones, and—”

“Human bones?”

“Absolutely human bones.” We stared at each other. “And they must’ve suspected where they came from. But for reasons I can’t fathom, I think someone put in a word, and … Well, I got a stern warning, my bones got confiscated, and here I am promising to be a good boy until the end of my professional life.” He gave an unhappy laugh.

“I do realize, old man,” I said, in a voice that perhaps shook a little, “that this isn’t the whole story.” He laughed again. “You once in a rather civilized fashion insisted that it was permissible for a chap to not hold forth about things he didn’t want to. Well.” I gave him a bow.

Indeed, he did not speak of these events to me again for a long time. And yet I never thought this would be the last I would hear on the matter.

I graduated respectably, William well. We found work in south London, Oxford, Leeds, London again. William got a position in Swansea, where he remained for two years, before moving to a hospital on the south coast. I took work in Durham.

“I can’t believe it,” William said. It was, I insisted, not so very far.

“It most certainly is.” He raised his voice. “You don’t even like
talking
about that place. You may feel duty-bound to revisit whatever sordid past you have there—” William, though angry, still did not pry—“but Durham doesn’t agree with you. I’m the one who meets you off the train all gaunt and harrowed.”

“I’m not thrilled by the prospect,” I allowed, “but don’t exaggerate. In every life one must dot and cross.”

We were five years into our careers when a conference at Glasgow was announced with a remit broad enough that most chaps from our year could attend. It became a reunion. It was a pleasure seeing everyone again, socializing with some of our old teachers, now colleagues. Five years, I know, is nothing: it is impossible now not to be amused at the nostalgia we felt.

There was—perhaps still is—a tiny medical museum in one wing of the quad. “Come on,” I said to William, the day we were to leave. “Let’s.” I suspect it is evident in what direction this story is heading.

The two rooms were jumbles of cases, charming in their way. Old surgical artifacts, dioramas of medical history. Sunlight slanted in, not particularly usefully.

I turned a corner and stopped. “What is it?” William saw my expression. He rushed to the case when he saw what I had found.

It was not a whole skeleton that dangled inside: only the skull, the shoulders and rib cage, the right arm and hand, and the humerus of the left. Everything below the fourteenth vertebra was missing. The bones had been polished. The design was vividly clear. I stared at the maritime scenes, the gargoyles, plants and patterns, the lines that looked like lines for the joy of lines.

He put his hands on the glass. “That’s quite something …” William started to say at last, and I said, “Don’t.”

Origin unknown,
the label read.
Artist unknown
.

I looked at the skull. “William,” I said, “when you were suspended, as you can probably imagine, there were all manner of rumors …”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you.” He stepped toward it.

“That’s it. The body you heard so much about. For a moment I wondered if it might be
another,
but that’s it. Or what’s left of it. What did they
do
?” he breathed. “
Look
at it …”