Bone Dance

Another opened on the third room in my apartment, the archives, all the precious contents shelved and tidy. As I stepped in, I saw more clearly: CDs fused to their plastic boxes in strange half-liquid curves; amplifiers and cassette decks blackened and brittle, their chassis warped, their cases leprous; videocassettes oozing together; the books transformed into neatly ranked flaking bricks of charcoal. The smell of burnt things was nauseating. Then, item by item, each piece of hardware powered up by itself. LEDs and digital counters lit like opening eyes on all sides. Fans came on, and stuttered and shrieked, their lubricants cooked away. The color monitor was the last; it burst into life with the refinery gun battle from White Heat, made grotesque and technically impossible by the spiderweb of cracks on the face of the picture tube. Flames licked out of the vent panels of everything.

And there was the door that opened onto Frances — Frances? — sitting beside me, holding a glass to my lips and saying, “Eat your opium, dear; there are children sober in Africa.” That might even have been real.

But the strangest was the flat, white world, like a sheet of paper, with nothing on it but a motionless line of pictographs like the ones from native southwestern cultures, stylized silhouette figures in black. I seemed to see them all from above. I was the one on the left end of the row, I knew, the one that might have been a dog or a rabbit. I couldn’t see the other end; I don’t know why.

The second figure on the left was a woman, her arms and legs at lively angles, wearing a headdress. Or possibly a halo of fire. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” said the dog/rabbit/I.

“It’s a debased age,” she said. She sounded disgusted, and a little like Frances. “You’re not supposed to simply land on the doorstep like an unlucky relative. You’ll have to go back.”

“I don’t know how.”

She clicked her tongue. “I could do it, but we’d better begin as we mean to go on. It’s time you met him-her anyway. You’ll love this.”

She wasn’t the next pictograph in line anymore. Instead there was another, curved and capering, two projections like horns or feathers poking up from its head. It was holding a flute.

“Ah! Ah! Not now!” it said, dismayed and delighted. “Indeed, you are a cub of mine. Sorta. And your timing sucks! You’re welcome anytime, as long as you only come when you’re called. This is your head speaking. Now beat it!”

As the white surface broke up like a bad video signal, I thought, That probably is what my head sounds like.

A decent continuity finally reasserted itself. I became aware of that — the feeling that the things around me were real events, in chronological order — even before I began to receive commentary from my senses. Then I felt the passage of air over my hair and face and shoulders, and smelled, faintly, an unlikely combination of growing things and rubbing alcohol. I heard footsteps and stirring cloth and a clink of metal against glass, and voices far away.

Opening my eyes required deliberate effort. When I did, I knew the room was part of an old farmhouse. I’m not sure why, except that it reminded me powerfully of where Dorothy woke up at the end of The Wizard of Oz. It even had checked curtains, open to the sun.

I was lying in a narrow bed between smooth, thick sheets. I’d been undressed, washed, and bandaged; probably several times by now, I realized. That made me uncomfortable, but I was too exhausted even to twitch.

I turned my head a little, and met the inquiring gaze of another person. He was built like a block of red sandstone, not particularly tall but wonderfully square. His hair was black and white in equal measure, and his broad red-brown face was lined on the forehead, at the corners of his eyes, in two brackets around his wide mouth. He wore a faded cotton shirt rolled up to the elbows and faded trousers. “Are you really awake,” he said in a voice surprisingly light for the shape of him, “or are you still out walking?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“No, you’re back. Probably not for long, which you shouldn’t worry about. I’m Josh Marten, head people doctor around here. Sherrea said I should tell you right away that she’s here, and your friends Theo and Frances as well, and that they’re safe.”

I closed my eyes in relief, because I’d just begun to wonder, and didn’t think I had the strength to make the words.

He crossed the room and laid a hand on my forehead. But it was a cool, dry hand, and I was too tired to mind. He took my pulse at my throat. “I think you’re done making me work so hard. Answers to other questions I’ll bet you have: You’ve been here three days. None of the damage was permanent, thanks to me. And this is about the best you’ll feel for a while, because when your painkillers wear off, I’m going to stop giving them to you during the day. You’re going to hate that, but it’s better than making an opium fiend of you. Now, go back to sleep.”

I closed my eyes and slid out from under the burden of thought.

When I woke again, there was a battered upholstered chair pulled up to the foot of the bed, with Frances in it. Her feet were up on the seat cushion, jammed against one arm, and her knees were propped on the other. Her head tilted sideways against the chair back. She was sleeping. The crescent moons of her eyelashes, under her straight black brows, looked like obscure mathematical symbols. Her mouth was closed and severe even now. One hand was curled around her ankles; the other arm trailed over the side of the chair to brush the floor. I was willing to bet her feet had gone to sleep.

Her eyes opened, as if I’d made a noise. “Good afternoon,” she said, a little hoarse. “As you see, they didn’t throw me overboard and keep the bribe. Though you might be wishing they had.”

I cleared my throat. “No. Why?”

She unfolded her legs with a snap. “Then I take it you haven’t started to hurt yet.”

She was wrong; I’d had long enough to realize that that was what had made me wake up. “Waiting for the note was a formality. He would have done it anyway,” I said.

“Would he? What in the Devil’s name did he think you’d done to deserve it?”

“Behaved like an asshole about three times too many.”

“My, my. They have the death penalty for assholeism now?”

“I told you he wasn’t going to kill me.”

Frances leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her chin propped on her laced fingers. “No? Then who was it who almost did? Doctor Brick Wall out there spent four hours over your unpromising-looking carcass saying things that will probably damn his soul to hell by whatever faith he subscribes to. Many of them he shouted at you. He seemed to think you weren’t helping.”

“I wish I’d been there. Sounds pretty fu

In measured cadence, she said, “It was not fu

I didn’t want to disagree with her. She seemed to have temporarily run out of things to say.

After a little while I ventured, “He said I couldn’t have any more dope, didn’t he?”

“He said that. And before you ask, I am not here to smuggle in a pipe of hash. But I’d be delighted to distract you with stories.”

I must have put the question mark on my face.

“What I had in mind,” she said, answering it, “is the tale in one part of The Rescue of the Protagonist from Durance Vile, a tragic omedy. Since I’m here and Sherrea isn’t, I claim dibs on first telling. Don’t you want to know how you were got out?”

I thought about it. I realized with a kind of gentle disappointment that I didn’t, really. I was out, and they had been exercised enough about it to get me out, which was nice. That seemed to be it. But it would be rude, I decided, not to let her tell me.

It may have taken longer than it seemed to work this out. Or some of it may have showed in my face. Whichever it was, it made Frances look at me strangely. “If you’re tired, I’ll go away.”