Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  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 …”

  “How did it get here?” I said.

  “Here here?” he said, pointing right at it, “or here here?” He circled his finger to indicate the world. “I don’t know. And I think it would not be sensible for me to pursue such enquiries.” He spoke with odd formality. “If there are those who know how it got here, I should avoid their company.” He looked at me. “But you and I will talk.”

  I came south. He looked me over when I alighted: I had lost weight. We bicycled to the Downs, and contentedly munched sandwiches in a basin of clay. It was an unusually hot afternoon. One of those days all slowly ambling bumblebees and honeysuckle and so forth, at which the English countryside, when it puts its mind to it, excels, and quite unlike any summer day anywhere else. Calm and still and lovely, but never without a sense of something impending. The sort of day one misses even as one experiences it.

  “So how are you getting on up there?” William said tightly.

  “Muddling through,” I said. “It won’t be for much longer.” He nodded.

  “I’m sure,” William said at last, “I could say what you chaps thought happened, in Glasgow.” He took a bite of bread, a puff of cigarette, a swig of cider. “But I can’t scrimshaw, Gerald. Not a notion how.” He gave me quite a smile. “It’s a queer thing to know your colleagues think you a thief of corpses for necromantic art. Who narrowly escaped jail …”

  “Not everyone,” I told him. “Some of us …”

  He waved his hand to hush me. “I didn’t carve it, but I did take the bloody body,” he said. And as the light grew slowly thick and the shadows long he told me all of it, his story, which I have, with a few omissions and a few emendations, outlined here.

  It was obvious he could tell I believed every word he said. I could see his relief at my lack of doubt. Only his description of the body’s early nights in the tenements elicited some shock from me.

  We had a hair-raising time of it cycling back to the station in time for our train.

  I was privileged to work with William for many years after that. I even ran one of his charities for a time after his death. I was not good at it, but I wanted to do my best for him.

  It was after the war, when his initial coolness towards the new National Health Service metamorphosed into enthusiasm, that William’s career blossomed. He was not a political man, but through his work in teaching hospitals in the 1950s he became committed to what is now called “social medicine.” It was for his efforts in this field that he was ultimately granted an OBE. He took great interest in pedagogy: he was a good teacher, though one who was easily sidetracked. His name is now attached to a surgical technique, an honor he would have pooh-poohed, and that I think would have delighted him.

  William was provocative on medical ethics. Not only did he support a presumed-consent model of organ donation, but he insisted that without explicit instructions to the contrary, everyone should be considered to have offered up their bodies to medical science. “William,” I would scold, “that is ridiculous. You don’t mean it.”

  “Certainly I do.” It was one of those arguments that people who’ve shared a lot for a long time are happy to perform in company. “You’re going to put me on the slab when I go,” he would insist. “So I can keep an eye on the class.” For all his joshing, he took the principle seriously. Not only did he sign his own body over, but he harangued his friends, insisted it was the duty of all doctors to make the same gesture. He went on at me in particular, of course, until at last I gave in and signed the form in front of him.

  I once mooted returning to Glasgow together, to look again at the exhibit. “It won’t achieve anything,” William told me firmly.

  “You know,” I said carefully. “I could do some sort of investigation into what happened. You might be in an awkward position, but I—”

  “Gerald,” he said. “I don’t want you to draw attention to yourself. I don’t want anyone connected to whatever it is I stumbled on looking for me. Or for you.”

  I nodded and looked away, remembering his young interlocutor. “Perhaps,” I said, “it’s just as well someone sent the police to your workshop. Before any other authorities could track you down.”

  Whenever I watched him operate, I noticed William’s close observation of the bones. Perhaps he thought lightning might strike twice, or perhaps that it had not been random lightning the first time, but a message, for him. “There are days,” he said to me more than once, “when everyone I see looks like a candidate. As if the world is full of designs.”

  It would not have been hard to check William’s own bones. I put it to him. I tapped his knee. “A little anesthetic?” I said, and he looked at me curiously. He mumbled a platitude about God refusing to prove His own existence. I think certainty either way would still have been excruciating to him, as he had admitted to the girl it would be, years before.

  None of us have to obey instructions. I consider my own existence proof of that. So much of life is cobbled together when plans go awry. That is often where happiness comes from.

  As soon as I was able, I wound up my loose ends in Durham and, eager for change, came permanently south. William and I moved into a house we could not really afford.

  More than once in those early years one or other of us would go off for a few days, without much explanation. I did so after that day on the Downs. At other times it was William who disappeared, to return in contemplative mood.

  We were always scrupulously respectful of each other’s secrets. I did not discuss his trips with him, but it took only a cursory search to find Scottish papers and ticket stubs to Glasgow among his
things, for all his stern words to me about that destination. Only once did he ever make mention of any such journey. Years later, after two days’ absence, William cleared his throat and poured himself some tea and said, “It’s gone.”

  I eventually said, “They change their exhibitions, museums, from time to time.” That was that.

  Perhaps on my own returns, William sought evidence as I did. He must have been disappointed if so: I was more careful than he, and never one for mementos or trophies, even after successful searches. He would find no telltale tickets, no scribbled directions through Glasgow tenements, no old rag doll with fraying lips.

  Very much later, when it became impossible to ignore the fact that William was dying, he began to speak about the design again. It was my task, by then, to let him talk of anything he wished. I am proud of how I did so, no matter if he ruminated in those last days on topics of which I wished he would not speak: on discarded drafts; on how it was the police got word of his researches and found him; on his inability to ever find the girl again. Elaborate theories about the design, not without surprising insights. Hardest of all, his own death.

  At the very end, when he could barely move or see, he whispered to me, “Let Glasgow have me. Why not, eh? You never know, Gerald.” Then urgently: “Oh but, oh, but I wish, I do, I wish, I wish.”

  I knew he longed for certainty, even as he purported to abjure it, to be part of something, but still it was very hard to hear this.

  And so I gave him my hand as he wheezed in the bed, and he held it, and I whispered and put my other hand around his and clasped it. He squeezed back.

  But though I was gentle I did not let up the pressure. William opened his eyes as I pressed his fingers into mine. I pressed his fingers so he could feel the bones beneath my thin old skin. I did not speak and neither did he. He did not speak ever again. He watched me and his eyes grew wider with something other than surprise and at the sight of them I had to close my own.

  William’s body was delivered to our long-haired student descendants, as he had wished.