Bone Dance

“Maybe I’ll be able to figure out who you are.”

“I know who I am.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Really.”

“All right. I don’t, particularly. But are you surprised that I’d rather be the palace eunuch than one of the great boogeymen of our age?”

“If we were only boogeymen,” she said, echoing my earlier words, “no one would care.” In the way she spoke, I heard again what she’d said to Dusty: Probably. I have a damnably long memory. Indeed. Nobody should have one that long.

“Have you ever done anything that Mick hasn’t?” I asked.

“Did he say that?”

“More or less.”

She laughed a little. Then she said, “He was mistaken.” She raised her eyes to mine. “But don’t tell him. He’ll find out eventually.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“The future is a land unmapped, from which no expedition has returned. I don’t think so. He had nothing to do with the Bang. Strange as it seems, he is, as these things go, a passable human being.”

“Are you going to kill me?” In spite of my conviction, it seemed reasonable to ask.

“I told you I was sorry. No. I’m not.”

“But you’re still going to get this Whatsisname.”

“Yes,” she said, “I am. In the best tradition of vigilantism, I’ve filled all the appointive offices myself: judge, jury, prosecutor, and she-who-pulls-the-trigger.”

“It’s a long time since the Big Bang,” I said uncertainly. I’d been almost at ease with her for a few minutes — or pleasurably uneasy, caught up in the heightened reality of verbal sparring. But her last declaration reminded me of the woman she’d been before she fell down.

“Sparrow, Tom Worecski is responsible for more deaths than Hitler. Does time wipe that clean? How much time? Does remorse? I don’t know if he’s sorry for murdering millions of people and making large areas of the Western Hemisphere uninhabitable, but tell me, how sorry ought he to be before I say, ‘Oh, never mind, I guess that makes it all right’?”

I stared at her, and she stared back. “Is that what I’m supposed to say when you apologize?” I asked.

She pressed her lips together. “Point to your side. But believe me, Tom has to die. And I have to do it. There’s no one else.”

“Chango, you could assemble a posse in five minutes if you told ’em what you wanted them for.”

“And shall I tell them how I come by my information? That I know Tom from way back, that we worked together, et cetera? No. There really is no one else.”

This time she didn’t sound as if she took pride in the fact. Or maybe the phrase meant something else, now. She sat staring at her strong hands crossed in her lap, as if images of the long, terrible, unchangeable past were shining up between her fingers.

I pumped the teakettle full of water and put it on the flame. Then I dumped the rest of the chamomile in my chipped enamel teapot and went back to the wing chair.

“Louisiana was wet,” I said. “And getting wetter.” I told the whole story without looking up. I had never told it to anyone. I’d been so careful never to even want to tell it that I’d mostly forgotten it myself. After all, no one else I knew remembered being born.

I’d heard the sound, rubbed my eyes, and recognized the hiss and bubble as ru

A dead, sunken face, a shaved head, a mummified naked body. There was a corpse in the box. There were eight boxes in the room, all alike. When, frightened, I turned my eyes away, I saw my own legs and feet, attached to the rest of me, bordered by a box with an open glass lid. I began to scream. I don’t know why; it was an instinct toward terror, a dread of being just like the eight dead things in the room. And of course I was, but for one small detail.

I scrabbled out of the box and fell, and learned that I couldn’t breathe in water. There was almost three feet of it on the floor. I dragged myself up the side of my resting place. On the walls above some of the coffin-boxes, red lights flashed. Warning, alert, something needs attention, system failure. It babbled through my head. Later I knew I’d understood the purpose of the lights, but not then.

I had a sudden clear knowledge, like another instinct, of electrocution and the conductivity of water. I staggered clumsily through the flood (the strangeness of that came to me later: I was born knowing how to walk) to a door (sight of it, and the word springing into my head, door, and the understanding of what it did), which I pounded and pushed on. Finally I found a lever in the wall next to it, which turned.

The door crashed inward on its hinges. It and the water that had leaned on it for — years? — threw me back into the room. One of the mummies floated past me, upward; another followed it. The water had broken the boxes open.

And then, when I had to know it, I knew how to swim. I lurched toward the ceiling of that underwater enamel house, sucked air out of the rapidly diminishing space there, and kicked out against the pressure, toward the door.

I learned eventually that it was the water of Lake Pontchartrain I was struggling against. The place where I came up, under a full moon with mist rising white from the surface into the cooler air of a midsummer night, was Bayou St. John. Three weeks later a hurricane added it all to the New Orleans basin.

“How long ago was that?” Frances asked after a little space of quiet had settled between us.

“Fifteen — almost sixteen years, now.”

She leaned her head back and smiled. “Mmm. If I’m right, you’re eighty or more. If you’re right, you’ve barely reached the Golden Age of Skepticism. Either way, you hardly look it.”

I don’t know what I’d expected from the first person to hear that story, but I found Frances’s response oddly comforting. Just another bizarre, life-threatening adventure. How many of them had she had? I went to pour hot water into the teapot.

There were a few cookies, bought maybe a week ago in the mall market, in a tin on the shelf. They weren’t fresh, but they had refused to go stale, either. I carried the tin, along with the teapot and my other mug, over to the desk and set them on the corner nearest her. She looked at the two mugs and said, “Entertain often?”

“I only have an extra for when I’m too lazy to wash the first one. If you were me, would you have a lot of close friends?”

“In my own fashion, I’m under the same constraints. And you’re right, I don’t. It’s a furtive little life, but it’s all mine.” She chewed carefully. “Better already. Butter and sugar, in sufficient quantity, will cure anything.” She ate and worked on her tea as if that were all she could concentrate on, and maybe it was. I’d done my talking; I was prepared to sit, and watch, and see what happened.

At last she set the cup down and slid her hands over her face. “Thank you. God, I’m tired.” She closed her eyes, and I wondered if she meant to fall asleep there. Then she said, “If we’d been left to our own devices, I think none of the Horsemen would have willingly been within a hundred miles of each other. As predators go, we were more like tigers than wolves. Forcing us together like that just made us worse.”

“That gave you a taste for the furtive life?” I asked.

I expected her to ignore me, or, more likely, to turn one of her phrases that sounded impressive and gave away nothing. Instead, she said, “Christ, no. If it gave me a taste for anything… no, only a distaste. For myself, among other things.” She sighed and tipped her head back against the chair. It was harder to see her expression now. “What a damned waste of human potential it all was.”