Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  "The police were by while you were gone," Jaycee said. "It's okay, they were just taking a report. I reported my car stolen."

  "Good thinking," Ansel said.

  "Maybeeee," she went on, "we can park it somewhere later tonight. "

  Now he frowned. "Are you sure that's such a good idea?"

  "I'm not sure of anything, but maybe it would give the guy some kind of chance."

  "A chance for what? If you were him, would you want one at this point? Legs all fucked up, probably other parts too, brain damage maybe. I vote we wait for the inevitable, dig him out of there, then dump him first and the car last."

  "It's not your garage, Ansel," I told him. "You don't get a vote. In somebody's garage, it's not a democracy."

  "Just looking out for my tax dollars," he said. "Because a few months from now, that's what he's going to be living on." Ansel turned to Jaycee. "Now you want to give him a chance? Whatever chances he's had, he's blown them. What more's he going to do with another one?"

  This was not the Ansel who'd first come up to me tonight asking about trust. This was an Ansel who remembered that he'd been cursed for life, or what little he'd done with his own, then got a chance to look around and see he still wasn't the last in line.

  On one level, I found it difficult to disagree with anything he'd said. I just wished it had come from someone whose opinion I could actually respect. And, as gruesome as it looked, I did wonder if it wouldn't be somehow merciful to simply let the man expire right where he was.

  But on another level, I thought of the picture I'd found in his pocket, and how he'd been carrying this and not something that could identify him. I didn't even want to know his name, because that would mean that thirty or forty or fifty years ago some hopeful young woman had given it to him. Maybe the woman in the photo. Or maybe she, whoever she was, had once spoken his name in another kind of love and hope. Either way, suppose he was holding on out of some deeply rooted hope of saying goodbye?

  Ansel bounced up from his haunches and over to look down on the broken figure embedded in the glass. "He's a sacrifice, Jaycee. Like a bog-body. Think of him that way, if it helps."

  "You lost me there," she said.

  "You know, like one of those bodies they pull out of the peat bogs in Ireland and wherever. Been in there a couple thousand years, but it's preserved them, they're like leather, so you can tell exactly how they died. They used to kill them three times over: strangle them, bash in their skulls, and cut their throats." He circled the hood, taking in the details. "Blunt object, sharp object…looks like he's gotten it two ways, at least."

  Ansel must've seen the way I was looking at him by now.

  "What? Can I help it if I've always been fascinated by ritual murder?" Then, to Jaycee: "So instead of good crops, your next year of business will be even better than the first. Lucky you, if this is all it's costing you, that's a pretty sweet deal."

  We told him to be quiet, that he wasn't helping matters now.

  "Your next year," he said to Jaycee, "you don't think I've got a stake in that too? Plus half the people inside that big house of yours tonight? Maybe you're just not seeing things clearly right now, but believe me, we do."

  Times were so tough now that these guys couldn't get another job stepping from an elevator with bags of food? Maybe they were, if your résumé looked like Ansel's did.

  Jaycee asked him to leave then—well, more like she demanded it, and maybe a wiser employer would have phrased it differently, diverting his attention and asking him to go back to the house and check on everything and everyone. Send him off feeling like something she actually valued.

  Instead, he slammed the door behind him, probably knowing even before I did that Jaycee was going to be asking one of us not to go home tonight, so she wouldn't have to be alone, and that it wasn't going to be him.

  Where sacrifices were concerned, Ansel seemed to be overlooking one thing: I'd always gotten the impression that those ancient tribes picked their best and brightest. What was the value of the sacrifice, otherwise?

  And what we had here wasn't even close.

  Unless the process had actually begun many years ago, far from the gutters, when the man in the windshield still possessed potential, and all we were seeing tonight was the final throes. In which case we weren't the sacrificers at all.

  We were just the tool swung for the final blow.

  *

  I'm not sure how it happened that I came to be privy to the innermost thoughts of old buildings. But I think it may have begun when I was very young and the lure of playing with matches was far more powerful than all the warnings I'd ever had, put together.

  All these years later I can remember watching the flames leap up the living room curtains. Even though I knew that things had slipped beyond my control, and that this was something I couldn't hide, couldn't lie about, couldn't take care of by myself, I still hesitated before running for my mother, mesmerized by the flames and their eager beauty. Even as I felt crushed and overwhelmed, the sight of things catching fire before me was exhilarating. I may have been a child, with no control over my life, told every day from waking until sleeping what to do and when to do it…but in that moment I had wielded the power of a god.

  No, my family didn't lose their house that day. But the place had been dealt a significant blow. From that point on I always sensed that it bore a grudge, that I was no longer welcome there.

  At least I always thought it was the walls.

  *

  Eventually not even Jaycee could deny that she was no longer in control of her house. From the lawn, now and again we would hear something shattering, something else splintering, plus all the laughter, constant and stupid and vindictive. If, inside the house, they gave one thought to Monday morning, they gave no indication. She dared not call the police again, not this time. Ansel had that much on his side, at least.

  So we retreated inside the garage, where the man in the windshield offered a peculiar solace: Things could always be worse.

  "Tell me I'm not a horrible person," she said.

  And I tried, really tried.

  "I've worked hard for what I have, and I don't want to lose it," she said. "I've already sacrificed. I lost you, didn't I?"

  Except I didn't remember it happening quite that way.

  "I've contributed, haven't I?" she said. "I've fed the hungry. I've…I've hired the unemployable."

  We had to laugh at that, a good long unhealthy laugh that seemed to sum up this entire night. Laugh like that with someone and you can almost fool yourself into believing she'll love you again.

  Soon, we heard them coming, before it had even occurred to us that they would, and so there was little we could do but listen to them stream across the back lawn, nothing but irate musculature and uproar, all the more frightful in their single-mindedness because at this point there didn't appear to be one good functioning mind among them.

  They burst through the garage's small door and rolled open the big one, then commandeered the car for their own reasons. It was Ansel himself who wrested the keys from Jaycee.

  They could've had the decency to drive it somewhere else, but were content with backing it out only as far as the alley. Where the bonfire they set would have no ceiling to impede it, and the smoke could spread far and wide across the sky.

  Their turn tonight. Not ours. Theirs.

  I watched the flames, even if Jaycee couldn't, and wondered if it was just a trick of shimmering heat that made the man in the windshield seem to writhe.

  Sure, we could've locked the garage door, made it harder for them.

  But why, all things considered?

  You might as well try to stem the tide of progress.

  THE FIREBRAND SYMPHONY

  "I believe that sound is a powerful tool to investigate the cosmos because it reflects the properties of celestial objects .... Socrates thought that the movement of celestial bodies generated music. But even though man is born with the music of the spheres in
his hearing, man doesn't hear this music anymore."

  — Dr. Fiorella Terenzi

  1

  I couldn't fight it: I am definitely more my father's son than my uncle's nephew, even though I was raised mostly by the latter. The two of them were as unalike as any pair of brothers could be—twelve years apart in age, with my father the younger of the two, and operating from opposite halves of the brain. Their life-paths skewed in such divergent directions that it's a wonder my uncle took me in at all, after I no longer had parents…although a part of me wonders if to him I wasn't some sort of noble experiment in the realm of those endless nature-versus-nurture hagglings that seem never to be satisfactorily resolved.

  My father, if you must know, was an irresponsible hedonist who held every credential required to live a tumultuous life and then die young. Ordinarily that's as secure a career path as any to ensure a kind of immortality, but he was no Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison, even though he was their contemporary.

  Every now and again, in a used record shop, some twisted sense of nostalgia will get the better of me and I'll flip through the bins of musty, dusty vinyl and find a sad cast-off or two from my father's band. They look embarrassing now, artwork choked with puffy lettering in day-glo colors and swirling with psychedelia. It looks silly and naive. Some styles of music and their trappings age well. Acid rock did not. Turn the album sleeves over and there he is, my father and his guitar and his bandmates, and in these pictures he's usually standing beside a tree or some eroded hulk of statuary, striving hard to look British because that was all the rage then, but mostly appearing unkempt and ill-bathed and very much a trendy product of his time. I'll look at his pictures and just barely remember the guy who would try to get me stoned when I was four or five. Yet, too, I'll remember us at a lake—exactly where, who knows?—his hair and beard streaming gallons of water, and the infinite patience he showed while teaching me to swim. I'll look at the pictures and wonder what it was about him that drew my mother to him above all the rest. And what it was that made her different from the multitudes of other skinny, star-struck groupies that must have come to him with flowers in their hair and, probably, a willingness to dispense blowjobs like M&Ms. I'll wonder whose idea it was that she get pregnant, or if it just happened that way. I'll imagine them loving and touring, and fighting because he couldn't stay faithful, or sober when it mattered, and I'll wonder why she continued to choose that life instead of raising her son, even after my father fatally overdosed in a rented Vermont farmhouse where a new album was to be rehearsed and recorded.

  Unanswered questions, all. Because he was dead in his so-called prime, and soon she was gone off with another one just like him, never to be heard from again, and my sixth birthday was still months away.

  Over these last several years, it's always strange to think of myself as being older than he ever got to be. Almost as strange as it was, growing up, to look at my uncle and think, They were brothers, those two? Because my uncle was a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, and perhaps under all that hair my father might have resembled him, but as it was, my father looked more like something Uncle Terrance would've studied, rather than admit to being related to.

  So, knowing that much, at least, you can imagine my surprise when, given the hundreds of esteemed colleagues my uncle must've worked with and associated with over the decades, it was me he chose to give that enormous skull to after he learned he had only a few months left to live.

  2

  Conventional wisdom would hold that Uncle Terrance shouldn't even have been traveling, but I suppose there's little enough about our family that has been strictly conventional. Besides, he was doing practically none of the driving himself, and admitted to me that he longed to see the Pacific Northwest one final time.

  It hurt to hear that. Not only because it drilled in the idea of his imminent demise, but because it emphasized that everything we most enjoy doing is done a finite number of times, and, whether or not we realize it at the moment, one of them will be the last. The last time we hear the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth. Or see the full moon. Or kiss the person we love most in the world.

  So. My uncle wanted to see the Northwest again before he died.

  And, as I was to realize, people with agendas have a remarkable way of seeing them through regardless of how sick they are, and maybe even because of it.

  For the past few years I've lived and worked in the forested hills of Oregon's Cascades. If you were to pin me to it, I would have to admit that probably I became the son of two fathers—although I distinctly recall Terrance admonishing me as a young boy that I was never to call him "Dad." From my father I inherited a love of and talent for music (well, noise and structure, if you were to nitpick), and from Uncle Terrance I inherited (if belatedly) a use for stability. I suppose I'm one of the lucky ones who eventually figured out a way to indulge most whims and meet most needs under the same roof.

  Even so, the path here, to our 5000 square feet on four acres, wasn't without its share of sordidness, violence, starvation, and drama. Fifteen years ago Terrance would've had every reason to write me off as a lost cause, settling on the more distressing answer to his nature-or-nurture conundrum.

  So I suppose what I was feeling most while I showed my uncle and his assistant/companion/lover around was a sense of smug but still affable pride. I'd succeeded in his world, but on my terms. So there.

  He stood in the center of my studio, which takes up a full fifth of the house, and nodded with bemusement at the vast arsenal of electronics. Keyboards. Synthesizers. Samplers. Sound processors. Racks of arcane gear with more tiny lights than a Christmas tree. Twenty-four track mixing board. Three pairs of reference monitors. Computers. Microphones on boom stands. Plus strange hunks of iron that hung from welded frameworks like mangled gongs.

  In technical terms, I'm what's known as a gear-slut.

  "What are you working on now—anything I can hear?" he asked, and then amended: "Anything I'd want to hear?"

  I sat at my main desk and grabbed a CD-24 that I'd burned the night before but hadn't yet sent down to Los Angeles: a rough mix for the film I was working on at the moment. I popped it into the workstation and routed the audio to the Mackie HR824s and the subwoofer, and when I potted up the volume, the effect was like a punch to the gut that radiated throughout the entire body.

  It's not music, per se. It's sound design, a logical extension of the discs I've recorded under the name Megalith that are themselves mostly sonic sculpting. Had this epiphany long ago that if I wanted to sustain any kind of music career, the only way to do that would be to shun trends and stick to the strange, which never goes out of style, because it's never wholly in. Which automatically imposes a lot of nevers. I would never see a chart position. Never get close to a gold record. Never have the cover of a magazine that sold more than ten thousand copies, or have the luxury of destroying a hotel room. Then again, I would never have to be the subject of one of those humiliating "Where-are-they-now?" documentaries on VH1. Or find myself on a packaged instant-nostalgia tour with two metric tons of flabby, forgotten flavors of last decade, trying to fake excitement for a crowd of balding one-time fans.

  Fortunately, the same conclusion was reached by an early sometime-collaborator of mine named Graham Pennick, who made the peculiar but lucrative transition from ferociously clangorous industrial music to scoring film soundtracks. And who was eventually able to start hiring me, on the strength of those first couple of Megalith recordings, to create ambiences and sonic textures that aren't part of the musical cues, yet are still an essential component of film soundtracks.

  Uncle Terrance listened to several moments of my past weeks' work with an expression of increasing distress: deep, murky drones that roiled in and out of one another's grasp like a tangle of vast worms.

  "Good god," he said. "It sounds so much like the movements of giant bowels that I think it's moving mine right where I stand."

  "Terrance," chided his friend
Liz. "Try harder not to be disgusting." But she obviously adored him. My aunt had been dead for a dozen years, and I was glad Liz had taken her place in his life, in a relationship that had evolved from professional into the personal. She was years younger, in her late forties, while Terrance was just over seventy, but he had aged nicely into one of those trim gents who have more than enough intellectual curiosity and just enough physicality to give them a vigor that some women find appealing.

  "Well," he said to her, "it'll never be confused with Chopin."

  I clicked ahead to another track and the oppressiveness lifted into a mood of hushed mystery, with the subtle, low chiming that might be made by stalactites if they could sing. I explained that these were for a film entitled Subterrain, set largely beneath the surface of the earth, about a hidden civilization there.

  The look on Terrance's face was that of a rational and rigorously analytical man who, in the twilight of his life, has been forced into submission, and to admit that there is no such thing as coincidence.

  "I brought you a present, you know," he said, with that kind of impishness some people develop when they grow old. He nodded around the studio. "Little question as to where you'll keep it. By the sound of things, I suspect it'll be quite at home right here."

  *

  He began by asking me if was familiar with the phrase "erratic enigmatics," and I had to confess that I wasn't. At least not by that terminology. By examples, of course I was. Most people have heard of a few.

  "It's any kind of anomaly, most often archaeological," he said, "that makes orthodox scholars profoundly uncomfortable, if not outright hostile, that it's been found in the first place. Physical remnants of one kind or another that appear either in geological strata before they should, or in places they shouldn't be appearing at all. The earth coughs them up with surprising frequency. Most of them you never hear about, and the ones you do are often minor. But the worst of them threaten to completely topple conventional views on human civilization and pre-history."