Bone Dance

By the time I got to Seven Corners market, the whole world seemed to flash colors in rhythm with my heartbeat. The flapping shutter of my headache kept time, too. Seven Corners has never been a good place for my preferred sort of marketing: it’s food, clothing, housewares, and the kind of services that go with those, mostly. So I didn’t much mind having to make my way through it with my eyes squinted three-quarters shut. It occurred to me, dimly, that I might have more than a hangover.

The weight of the sun finally brought me to a ragged halt at the market’s edge. I stood under an awning, supporting myself by propping my hip against a table, and pretended to be thoughtful about a tray of tomatillos. The next stall over had crates of live poultry, and the noise and smell were unlovely. A black woman with a serpent scarred from cheek to cheek over the bridge of her nose traded the vendor a bottle of homebrew for a white rooster; the vendor popped a little sack over the bird’s head, tied its feet together, and ran a loop of string through its bonds for a carrying handle. The woman walked away, swinging a rooster too dismayed to struggle. It gets worse, I wanted to tell him, thinking of his new owner’s scar.

I was waiting, I realized, for my wits to disappear into darkness. As if it would happen when I was ready for it. There would be some consolation in knowing what it was. Brain tumor, bad food, the heat? The heat would kill cactus. Perspiration was trickling out of my hairline, warm as the air, too warm to be doing its job.

The poultry dealer had a pair of doves in a wicker cage, velvety gray and sullen. Doves in paintings were never sullen. They seemed, in fact, to have managed a permanent state of exaltation, like the mindless fluttering ones around a chalice in… Sherrea’s… cards.

I stood clouted with revelation amid the produce. I wanted knowledge. Sherrea claimed to call it up out of a seventy-eight-card deck. I didn’t believe in the cards, but I might, if pressed, admit to uncertainty about Sher. A little mind reading, with tarot as its rationalization — however she explained it to herself, she might locate my missing memories. If she was a mind reader, if the memories were there, if there was any help in them. But I had to try.

The brown grandmotherly woman who sold the tomatillos was shooting ungrandmotherly narrow-eyed looks at me, so I turned to move on. But I missed my step and stumbled against one of her awning poles, rocking the whole canvas roof, and she shouted something about mi madre. That made me laugh. The sun hit me over the head with its hammer when I came out of the shade, and I stopped laughing.

The Ravine forms the western edge of the Bank, only a few hundred yards from Seven Corners market. It’s full of the cracked pavement of an old interstate highway — still a perfectly good road, in an age that requires less of its road surface and has no use for the concept of “between states.” From the lip of the Ravine I could see the Deeps on the other side, hard gray and brown brick and wood on the nearest structures, shading farther in to rose, bronze, black pearl, and verdigris in spires of stone, metals, and brilliant glass. The empress of it all, rising from its center, was Ego, the tallest building in the City, whose reflective flanks had no color of their own, but wore the sky instead — relentless, cloudless blue today. The towers of the Deeps, rising in angles or curves, were made more poignant by the occasional shattered forms of their ruined kin. If I’d reached them as quickly on foot as I have in the narrative, maybe I’d have no story to tell. Or maybe I would. Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and the pulleys.

The bridge over the Ravine was scattered with vendors who hadn’t found a place in the market. Very few had awnings, or even stalls; they spread blankets on the scorching sidewalks, and kept their hats and shawls and parasols tilted against the sun. The heat rose with the force of an explosion from the road surface below, and the whole scene wiggled in a heat mirage. Near the center of the bridge, I stopped to press my hands over my eyes, trying to squeeze the aching out of my head, to replace it with a firm sense of up and down, forward and back. I shivered. Maybe the sweat was working, after all. Except that I didn’t seem to be sweating anymore.

A warm wind brushed past me. No, it was the sudden breeze of people going by. So why didn’t they go! I opened my eyes. A ski

I’ve heard them compared to rabbits in the spring. Maybe the people who do are afraid of rabbits. The Jammers were pale, thin as wire, and as they danced their arms and legs crisscrossed like a chainlink fence of skin and bone. They weren’t dressed for the heat, but I understand Jammers don’t feel it, or cold, or much of anything besides the passion of the drum in their veins.

The nightbabies, who every sunset brought their parents’ money down from the tops of the towers or from the walled compounds of parkland at the City’s edge, would follow a cloud of Jammers like gulls after a trash wagon. They’d try to copy the steps. But that dance has no pattern, no repeats, and the caller is the defect or disease that makes the Jammer bloodbeat and the shared mind that goes with them. The hoodoos claimed the Jammers as kin, but I never heard that the Jammers noticed. The nightbabies pestered them for prophecies, for any words at all that they could repeat down in the clubs to give them a varnish of artful doom for a few hours, until something else went bang.

But I didn’t open fortune cookies, or feed hard money to the Weight-and-Fate in the Galena de Juegos, or seek out prophecies from the Jammers. No one could prove to me that the future was already on record. And if it was — well, the future is best friends with the past, and my past and I were not on speaking terms. Prophecy was a faith for the ignorant and a diversion for the rich, and I was neither. The Jammers couldn’t know anything about me.

“Infant creature,” sang one of the Jammers, “ancient thing, long way from home.”

Lucky guesses didn’t count. I could be, when I wanted, as close to invisible as flesh and blood came. Nobody Particular in a street full of the same. It didn’t seem to be working now. “Blow off!” I shrieked.

“Barely a step away from home,” piped another voice.

“On one side.” A third Jammer.

Fourth: “And on the other.”

“Ain’t got no home at all.”

“Have you no homes? Have you no families?”

They all seemed to think that was hilarious. Given that they’re supposed to share a mind, it was the equivalent of laughing at one’s own joke.

By that time I couldn’t tell if I’d heard any voice twice. “Get away from me,” I said, “or I’m going to hurt one of you.” The part of my mind that was doing my thinking, far away from the rest of me, was surprised by the screech in my voice. “Maybe two of you,” I added, just to prove I could.

“You are the concept immaculate,” caroled a Jammer, shoving her/his hollow face up close to mine. The skin, between streaks of gray paint, was opaque and flaky-looking; the breath the words came out on was eerily sweet. “You are the flesh made word. Whatchoo go

“Which way you go

“This is the step, this is it, right here.”

I folded my arms around my head, as if to protect it from angry birds. “Go away!” I screamed, and now even my thinking mind, cowering in its comer, didn’t care if every living soul on the bridge saw me, and knew I was afraid.

“Step!” “Step!”

I was closed in by a fence of bones singing in the voices of crows, and if I didn’t get out now it would club me to my knees with my own secrets. I shut my eyes and punched.