Good Bones (8 page)

In
school, when I first heard the word
Flanders
I thought it was what nightgowns were made of. And pyjamas. But then I found it was a war, more important to us than others perhaps because our grandfathers were in it, maybe, or at
least some sort of ancestor. The trenches, the
fields
of mud, the barbed wire, became our memories as well. But only for a time. Photographs fade, the rain eats away at statues,
the
neurons in our brains blink out one by one, and goodbye to vocabulary. We have other things to think about, we have lives to get on with. Today I planted five
poppies
in the front yard, orangey-pink, a new hybrid. They’ll go well with the marguerites. Terrorists
blow
up airports, lovers slide blindly in
between the
sheets, in the soft green drizzle my cat
crosses
the street; in the spring regatta the young men
row on, row
on, as if nothing has happened since 1913, and the crowds wave and enjoy their tall drinks with cucumber and gin. What’s wrong with
that?
We can scrape by, more or less, getting from year to year with hardly a
mark
on us, as long as we know
our place
, don’t mouth off too much or cause uproars. A little sex, a little gardening, flush toilets and similar discreet pleasures;
and in the sky
the satellites go over, keeping a bright eye on us. The ospreys,
the
horned
larks
, the shrikes and the woodland warblers are having a thinner time of it, though
still bravely
trying to nest in the lacunae left by pesticides, the sharp blades of the reapers. If it’s
singing
you want, there’s lots of that, you can tune in any time; coming out of your airplane seat-mate’s earphones it sounds like a
fly
buzzing, it can drive you crazy. So can the news. Disaster sells beer, and this month hurricanes are the fashion, and famines:
scarce
this, scarce that, too little water, too much sun. With every meal you take huge bites of guilt. The excitement in the disembodied voices says: you
heard
it here first. Such
a
commotion in the
mid
-brain! Try meditation instead, be thankful for the annuals, for the smaller mercies. You listen, you listen to the moonlight, to the earthworms revelling in the lawn, you celebrate your own quick heartbeat. But below all that there’s another sound, a ground swell, a drone, you can’t get rid of it. It’s the guns, which have never stopped, just moved around. It’s the guns, still firing
monotonously, bored with themselves but deadly, deadlier, deadliest, it’s
the guns
, an undertone beneath each ordinary tender conversation. Say pass the sugar and you hear the guns. Say I love you. Put your ear against skin: below thought, below memory,
below
everything, the guns.

W
HERE SHOULD I
begin? After all, you have never been there; or if you have, you may not have understood the significance of what you saw, or thought you saw. A window is a window, but there is looking out and looking in. The native you glimpsed, disappearing behind the curtain, or into the bushes, or down the manhole in the main street – my people are shy – may have been only your reflection in the glass. My country specializes in such illusions.

Let me propose myself as typical. I walk upright on two legs, and have in addition two arms, with ten appendages, that is to say, five at the end of each. On the top of my head, but not on the front, there is an odd growth, like a species of seaweed. Some think this is a kind of fur, others consider it modified feathers, evolved perhaps from scales like those of lizards. It serves no functional purpose and is probably decorative.

My eyes are situated in my head, which also possesses two small holes for the entrance and exit of air, the invisible fluid we swim in, and one larger hole, equipped with bony
protuberances called teeth, by means of which I destroy and assimilate certain parts of my surroundings and change them into my self. This is called eating. The things I eat include roots, berries, nuts, fruits, leaves, and the muscle tissues of various animals and fish. Sometimes I eat their brains and glands as well. I do not as a rule eat insects, grubs, eyeballs or the snouts of pigs, though these are eaten with relish in other countries.

Some of my people have a pointed but boneless external appendage, in the front, below the navel or mid-point. Others do not. Debate about whether the possession of such a thing is an advantage or disadvantage is still going on. If this item is lacking, and in its place there is a pocket or inner cavern in which fresh members of our community are grown, it is considered impolite to mention it openly to strangers. I tell you this because it is the breach of etiquette most commonly made by tourists.

In some of our more private gatherings, the absence of cavern or prong is politely overlooked, like club feet or blindness. But sometimes a prong and a cavern will collaborate in a dance, or illusion, using mirrors and water, which is always absorbing for the performers but frequently grotesque for the observers. I notice that you have similar customs.

Whole conventions and a great deal of time have recently been devoted to discussions of this state of affairs. The prong people tell the cavern people that the latter are not people at all and are in reality more akin to dogs or potatoes, and the cavern people abuse the prong people for their obsession with images of poking, thrusting, probing and stabbing. Any long
object with a hole at the end, out of which various projectiles can be shot, delights them.

I myself – I am a cavern person – find it a relief not to have to worry about climbing over barbed wire fences or getting caught in zippers.

But that is enough about our bodily form.

As for the country itself, let me begin with the sunsets, which are long and red, resonant, splendid and melancholy, symphonic you might almost say; as opposed to the short boring sunsets of other countries, no more interesting than a lightswitch. We pride ourselves on our sunsets. “Come and see the sunset,” we say to one another. This causes everyone to rush outdoors or over to the window.

Our country is large in extent, small in population, which accounts for our fear of empty spaces, and also our need for them. Much of it is covered in water, which accounts for our interest in reflections, sudden vanishings, the dissolution of one thing into another. Much of it however is rock, which accounts for our belief in Fate.

In summer we lie about in the blazing sun, almost naked, covering our skins with fat and attempting to turn red. But when the sun is low in the sky and faint, even at noon, the water we are so fond of changes to something hard and white and cold and covers up the ground. Then we cocoon ourselves, become lethargic, and spend much of our time hiding in crevices. Our mouths shrink and we say little.

Before this happens, the leaves on many of our trees turn blood-red or lurid yellow, much brighter and more exotic than the interminable green of jungles. We find this change beautiful. “Come and see the leaves,” we say, and jump into our moving vehicles and drive up and down past the forests of sanguinary trees, pressing our eyes to the glass.

We are a nation of metamorphs.

Anything red compels us.

Sometimes we lie still and do not move. If air is still going in and out of our breathing holes, this is called sleep. If not, it is called death. When a person has achieved death, a kind of picnic is held, with music, flowers and food. The person so honoured, if in one piece, and not, for instance, in shreds or falling apart, as they do if exploded or a long time drowned, is dressed in becoming clothes and lowered into a hole in the ground, or else burnt up.

These customs are among the most difficult to explain to strangers. Some of our visitors, especially the young ones, have never heard of death and are bewildered. They think that death is simply one more of our illusions, our mirror tricks; they cannot understand why, with so much food and music, the people are sad.

But you will understand. You too must have death among you. I can see it in your eyes.

I can see it in your eyes. If it weren’t for this I would have stopped trying long ago, to communicate with you in this halfway language which is so difficult for both of us, which
exhausts the throat and fills the mouth with sand; if it weren’t for this I would have gone away, gone back. It’s this knowledge of death, which we share, where we overlap. Death is our common ground. Together, on it, we can walk forward.

By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, take me to your leaders. Even I – unused to your ways though I am – would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.

Instead I will say, take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.

These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

T
HE THIRD HAND
is the one stamped in bear’s grease and ochre, in charcoal and blood, on the walls of five-thousand-year-old caves; and in blue, on the doorposts, to ward off evil. It hangs in silver on a chain around the neck, signalling with its thumb; or index finger extended, and with its golden wrist attached to an ebony stick, it strokes its way along the textural footpath, from Aleph to Omega. In churches it lurks in reliquaries, bony and bejewelled, or appears abruptly from fresco clouds, enormous and stern and significant, loud as a shout: Sin! Less elegant, banal even, and stencilled on a metal plate, it bosses us around:
Way Out
, it orders.
Up Here. Way Down
.

But these are merely pictures of it: roles, disguises, captured images, that in no way confine it. Do pictures of love confine love?

(The man and the woman walk down the street, hand in passionate hand; but whose hand is it really? It’s the third hand each one holds, not the beloved’s. It’s the third hand that joins them together, the third hand that keeps them apart.)

The third hand is neither left nor right, dexter nor sinister. Consider the man who is caught in the act, red-handed as they say. He proclaims his innocence, and why not believe him?
What axe?
he says.
I didn’t know what I was doing, it wasn’t me, and look, my hands are clean!
No one notices the third hand creeping away painfully on its fingers, like a stepped-on crab, trailing raw blood from its severed wrist.

But that happens only to those who have disowned it, who have cut it off and nailed it to a board and shut it up in a wallsafe or a strongbox. It’s light-fingered, the hand of a thief in the night; it will always get out, it will never hold still. It writes, and having written, moves. Moves on, dissolving, dissolving boundaries.

Vacant spaces belong to it, the vowel O, all blank pages, the number zero, the animals wolf and mole, the hour before birth and the minute after death, the loon, the owl, and all white flowers. The third hand opens doors, and closes them thoughtfully behind you. It is the other two that busy themselves with what goes on in the room.

The third hand is the hand the magician holds behind his back, while showing you the other two, candid and empty.
The hand is quicker than the eye
, he says. Notice that it’s
hand
, singular. Only one. The third.

And when you walk through the snow, in the blizzard, growing cold and then unaccountably warmer, as night descends and sleep numbs you and you know you are lost, it’s the third hand that slips confidingly into your own, a small hand, the hand of a child, leading you onward.

I
WANT TO
get the rose-bushes in first. I like just sitting there. Last night there was a firefly. Can you imagine?

He said I could heal myself. He told me over the phone. He said, I can hear it in your voice. You should meditate on light for three minutes every day, and drink the leaves of cabbages, the leaves right next to the outer ones. Put them in a blender. Some garlic, too. You’ll pee green, but you’ll heal. You know, it actually worked, for a while.

This is not attractive. I know it isn’t, especially the hair. What do I want? I want you to talk about normal things.

I know I look like hell. But it’s still me in here. What do I want? I want you to talk about normal things. No I don’t. I want you to look me in the eye and say,
I know you’re dying
. But for Christ’s sake don’t make me console you.

I said, get the
fuck
out. This has nothing to do with my
fucking
attitude. Of course I’m bitter! Get out or I’ll throw something at you. Where’s the bedpan? You know I don’t mean it. Christ I’d like a drink. Well, why not, eh?

No, don’t. Don’t hug me. It hurts.

I want to see what comes up, in the spring. Damn squirrels, they eat the bulbs. Mothballs are supposed to work.

If you want to cry, do it around the corner where she can’t see you.

It’s time for you to go home.

Something went wrong, we don’t know what. We think you should come down at once.

— Can’t you do something? It isn’t her, it isn’t her! She looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy, she’s all swollen up, I can’t stand it!

— It’s not bothering her, she’s in a coma.

— I don’t believe in comas! She can hear, she can see everything! If you’re going to talk about
death
, let’s go down to the coffee-shop.

It’s cruel, it’s cruel, she’s never going to wake up! She can’t get back into her body, and if she did she’d hate it! Can’t somebody pull the plug?

I knew she’d died when the ashtray broke. It cracked right across. It was the one she gave me. I knew she was right there! It was her way of letting me know.