Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  I never tried to take anybody with me before.

  He smiles. Because your evolution has made a bold new leap. Above the uproar and the sobbing, you can almost hear him telling you to embrace it, that you’ve earned it. He smiles, and his pride in a job well done is the worst thing you’ve ever seen out of him.

  In your dreams, and only there, you’ve seen the body that awaits you, and can only imagine the things it can do. It has none of the weaknesses with which you’ve become so familiar. It gives only the vaguest hint of having once been human. In your dreams, you’ve wondered what it eats, and how much, thinking that with teeth like that, it must be a lot.

  But now you know what really fuels it.

  You’ve been sucking it up for a lifetime.

  And worst of all, or maybe best of all, you know that you will no longer be alone.

  You will be legion.

  As you bleed out, the last thing you notice is the world, and how most of them, no matter what their tragedies and griefs, have never appreciated how truly lucky they have been.

  Soon, they will learn better.

  They’re all meant for so much worse.

  HATE THE SINNER, LOVE THE SIN

  She came as soon as she got the call, speeding in from West Hollywood in spite of how badly sickrooms depressed her. Lynette had always hated the smell of sickness, the wheeze and gurgle of breathing under siege. So much so that, until this moment, she’d never thought how much worse visiting a deathbed would be, the room heavy with the knowledge that its occupant would never be walking out.

  Which was, she supposed, a technicality this time. It had been at least ten years since Jarvis had walked at all.

  He was sitting up, though, and that felt comforting, somehow less final. Attendants had hauled him from the bed and set him in one of his special chairs, vastly wide to begin with and reinforced to contain him. He trailed wires to monitors and machines, and in one corner of his small loft home was the motorized cart he used to move around.

  “How long do you have?” she asked.

  “It’s down to hours.” Lost behind crinkles and folds, his eyes had not yet lost their gleam.

  It seemed wrong that what should be a private moment was anything but. She’d counted seventeen others milling around, Deacons and aides and a few of the other ponderous residents who lived here on the eighth floor.

  “I’d be gone already if it wasn’t for— “ He wafted one hand at a defibrillator, its paddles at the ready. “They can only jumpstart your heart so many times.” His voice was weak, bubbling up as though through a thickened stew. “I wanted you here at the end. One last lesson.”

  Surely not. He seemed barely able to speak. What could he have left to teach?

  “You still have a problem with Wrath, is what I hear,” he said. ”I always knew you’d have a problem with Wrath.”

  He was the fattest person she had ever seen, a wide slab of face dripping jowls toward greater rolls of flab that looked endless, even while swathed in the robes they worked around him. He was beyond all human proportion. The visible bits of him that could get only so big—hands and fingers, feet and toes—poked from his extremities and seemed absurdly small.

  Here within the tower, and beyond, Jarvis was a legend.

  “You know what my life has been devoted to,” he said, “and in the way I seemed best suited to serve.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “One last sin, then. A dispensation has been granted. Under the circumstances.” His mouth, plumped between his cheeks into a prissy bow, opened wider as he gulped for air. “My death shouldn’t be wasted. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  She didn’t understand, or didn’t want to. “How could it be a waste when your whole life has brought you to it?” His adult life, at least. She’d seen pictures of him as a boy, an adolescent, a college student. Not a soul on earth would recognize that young, trim Jarvis in the man he was now.

  “You know me—I never waste a crumb. Think of my death as the last marrow we get to suck out of a bone.” The folds of his cheeks cracked into a labored smile. “The clock ticks down. You know that. You live by it too. You wouldn’t want to be so selfish as to slow its progress even a few moments, would you?”

  No. No, she wouldn’t.

  “Then which do you think is the greater sin?” he asked. “Suicide, or murder?”

  Her knees felt on the verge of giving way as tears scalded her cheeks. She should’ve guessed that she’d been summoned for more than saying goodbye.

  “If we get the timing right, we should be able to manage them both,” he said.

  Jarvis motioned for one of his attendants to bring him a towel-wrapped bundle. He peeled aside folds of peach terrycloth to reveal a handgun and a knife. He gripped the latter by the handle and held it out to her.

  “Take it,” and his voice was so gentle.

  It had come from the kitchens, a santoku. She found an awful symmetry here, that he should be asking her to dispatch him with one of the knives that had prepared so many of his meals. The knife had helped make him what he was today; now he was asking it to unmake him.

  “Come on,” he coaxed, surprisingly jovial. “What are you afraid of? That you’ll cut into me and find gravy?”

  Lynette sputtered laughter. He’d always had a knack for blindsiding her that way, disarming her in moments of doubt.

  “TAKE IT!” he shouted. It gave her a jolt, and left no doubt who was in charge. She was well along the hierarchy of Les Hédonistes, at the fourth level and ready to ascend further, but in this moment she felt like a novice, an Indolent.

  He shifted tactics, turning kindly. “Tell me—how much have you made us so far this year, down on the trading floor?”

  She tried to recall the latest tally she’d seen on the portfolio she managed. “About thirty-two million.”

  He loosed a rumble from some deep well of pride. “Then don’t tell me you don’t have cutthroat instincts.”

  Lynette stepped forward, further into the smells of his sickness and his mass, and took the santoku by the handle. He nodded approval, head squashing into its foundation of wattles, and hefted the gun to the side of his skull. The trigger guard had been removed to better accommodate his hand.

  “Once across the throat should do it,” he said. “I’ll finish.”

  She told him that she couldn’t.

  “Of course you can. Just start thinking of someone besides yourself for a change. One death, two sins. It’s for the greater good.” Jarvis blinked his tiny folded eyes while waiting for her to show resolve…then sighed. “Be a disgrace, then. Humiliate yourself in front of your betters and your lessers.”

  Lowering the gun, he squirmed in his chair and glared. The snarl of his derision seemed to surge up from a place so deep inside it might never have been touched by pity. Only piety.

  “I guess you’re your mother’s daughter after all.”

  As she held the knife and stared at him, helpless and yet as imposing as a bull, she realized that in his end Jarvis was everything at once, the embodiment of each of the hierarchies. Immobilized just this side of death, he couldn’t help but be Sloth incarnate, and his Pride would have him die in a way that mattered. Yet he was filled with Envy for those who would outlive him, and clung to his last moments with the Greed of Midas. Wrath? Of course it was there. He wanted more time, more food, more drink, more everything, and they were denied him. Above all, it was Gluttony that had put him here.

  Back up a moment—what of Lust?

  She often wondered if he’d taken the path of Gluttony as early as he had, and to such an extreme, to spare the two of them what would otherwise have been sure to happen on the floor just below, the seventh, after she made it there. Would it have really been so bad, though? Surely it would have counted as one the greatest of sins. Why else was incest taboo the world over?

  She would’ve done it, Lynette knew now. Willingly. Eagerly, even.

  Knife in hand, she looked for the slimmer ma
n he might have been and imagined them together in that way, for a greater good, and silently asked him whose resolve had really faltered?

  She forgave him anyway.

  Did Jarvis know what she was thinking? He looked up at her as though he did, and again rumbled in his depths, appraising her in ways he knew he never could again. Veiled by folds of skin, his eyes gleamed bright and hard, and his mouth parted with a grunt, a sound he must have made every day over the platters they brought him. She took it as a mark of honor that he should make it over her. The corners of his mouth curled upward, and he showed her the flattened ladle of his tongue before tipping back his head. Thinking, she hoped, of all the things they’d never done.

  Or maybe he was trying to make her despise him. Motives could be so hard to read in someone whose face had been swallowed so far into the rest of his body.

  “Don’t disappoint me,” he said. “And I want you to hate me while you do it. Let me be the object of your Wrath. Haven’t you ever regretted letting me bring you into this life? If you haven’t…then you’re as timid a sheep as your mother…you’ve only followed a different shepherd. No mind of your own. Only the appearance of one.”

  She scowled at his cruelties and felt the weight of the knife. Thought of all the things that could’ve been in her life by now, and weren’t. Because they were special here, all Martyrs in their way, and there were few who understood.

  His voice turned solemn: “We drink damnation unto ourselves so the Kingdom might come to others that much sooner.“

  She joined him, steadied by the comfort of ritual: “We indulge these appetites and transgressions not for our own gratification, but dedicated to the glory of God, until Christ may come again.”

  Adding, by herself, for herself: “Goodbye, Daddy.”

  Jarvis mashed both eyes shut, and she leaned her weight into the stroke, slashing hard and deep so he would feel how badly she wanted to please him. The blade parted flesh from flesh, fat from fat, jugular from itself, and the spray pumped by his overburdened heart ebbed after a moment, as though the folds of his neck sought to close around the wound.

  His finger twitched on the trigger and rendered his body’s efforts obsolete.

  The others gave her a few respectful moments, then approached from both sides, from behind, hands taking turns on her shoulders in what was evidently their idea of comfort. If she scorned them in this, was that, too, a sin? She hoped it was. Nothing wasted. One more tick of the clock, one act closer to the Day Of Days. Most of all, she hoped for the same thing those who’d come throughout the centuries before had, and had never been privileged to enjoy: to see it happen in her lifetime.

  Lynette broke away and crossed the loft to its bank of windows, and pushed aside the curtain just enough so she could lean her head against the cool plate glass. Eight floors below, Los Angeles went on without pause or comment, never stopping to notice one more death in the night.

  “Can I take that from you?”

  She snapped her head around and was surprised to find that it was Hannigan—she hadn’t even heard the gears and motor of his chair as he rolled up.

  Lynette followed his gaze to her hand. She was still holding the knife. She rested it on the towel draped across his lap, although not before she’d entertained the thought of a second killing, done without the benefit of dispensation. Maybe his last words would congratulate her on her initiative—possibly even extra points for knifing a cripple. Or maybe she would get lucky and sever his vocal cords.

  “Whose idea was that?” she asked.

  “Jarvis’s, of course.” His face was pleasant and plain and bureaucratically calm.

  “Nobody talked him into it?”

  “Did Jarvis ever seem to you like a man who could be talked into anything?”

  Other than a twelfth helping, you mean? What was it about death, anyway, that brought on a need for stupid jokes? She kept her mouth shut; let Hannigan wonder what she had to smirk about. With blood on her hands, she was all too aware of his control over her, as both Deacon and her assigned advisor. He would recommend as he saw fit.

  “Can I ascend now?” Lynette said. “Finally?”

  Pensive, he played his lips on the wheelchair’s breath pipe as if it were a nipple. As Deacon, his service to Les Hédonistes was administration rather than iniquity. Deacons were outside of the hierarchy. Technically—Lynette had begun to realize it wasn’t as clear-cut as they made out. Deacons sinned as actively as any Fornicant, they were just slyer about it. As overseers, from bottom floor to top, they were nothing if not voyeurs.

  “Can I ascend?” she asked again.

  He shook his head. “Not yet.” Hannigan tipped his chin down at the knife, as if she needed a reminder of what she’d done with it. “That wasn’t Wrath. Whatever you were feeling in that moment, it wasn’t Wrath.”

  *

  Like almost every friend she had back when every decision was made for her, she used to lie awake in bed and listen to her parents fight. Eventually Lynette made a ritual of promising herself that it would never be like that when she was grown up, a precise way of whispering vows and ticking them off on her fingertips in such exacting configurations that it was sure to seal the pact with God.

  They’d never said so, but her sisters must have come to similar conclusions. Gina was old enough to stay out on her own, past the late evening fireworks when their father got home. Naomi wasn’t, but she’d still taken to slipping from her window into a secret existence somewhere else. It was every sister for herself.

  This phase preceding the split must have seemed longer than it actually was, its time stretched like taffy, and wasn’t even all bad. As much as the sound of her mother’s fractured voice scraped at Lynette’s heart, she knew that it would at least be followed by the balm of her father coming in to kiss her goodnight and reassure her that, even though his absences were getting longer, more frequent, there was still stability in the world, even under their roof.

  “Are you getting a divorce?” she asked more than once, a sober and reasonable question.

  He would tell her he didn’t know. “But sometimes God has different plans for people…and we have to accept that. Even when it hurts.”

  They would talk about her day, all the trivial things that seemed as heavy as iron then, then when she felt herself sliding toward sleep she would have him tell her the story, the bedtime story, this old story but new to her, that reduced all other stories to the silly cartoons they were.

  “Once, a very, very, very long time ago,” he would begin, and on the nights when he seemed playful, in spite of the arguments with her mother, he would rattle off endless verys, like a stuck CD, until Lynette made him go on, “God created the heavens and the earth. But you know that story. Then, only a very, very long time ago, God sent his son to die for our sins, and you know all about that story too.”

  Sometimes, goofing around, he would lean down toward her. “You haven’t forgotten those, have you?”

  She would assure him that she hadn’t, and he would pretend to look so relieved you’d think she’d just dodged a speeding car.

  “That’s my good girl. Anyhoo…after God’s son died, and rose from the dead, and said goodbye to his disciples and rose into Heaven, it was time for God to start thinking about the Second Coming. So God gathered together his wisest angels and asked them, ‘How shall we know when the time is right to send my son again? How shall we know when the time is right to begin the thousand years of peace on earth?’

  “The angels looked at each other, and one had an idea. ‘Let us send him back when they’ve lost all hope, when war and famine and plague have claimed so many of them they fear the world must be at an end.’ The angel thought it was a great idea, you know, and it sounds pretty good to me.

  “But God said, ‘It’s always going to be the darkest hour for someone. No, we can do better than that. I mean, what am I paying you guys for?’” Then Dad would tickle her, or do something equally mood-breaking, so she would kno
w he was only joking with that last line.

  “So the angels thought some more, and another one had an even better idea. ‘He should be announced by signs in the sky. So let him return when the star that passes their world every seventy-six of their years has passed them by another seven times.’

  “But God didn’t like this one either. ‘No, that’s a crappy idea too,’ he said —“ her dad would do this part with thunder raging in his voice “— and to get them all to understand he really meant business, he hurled a bolt of lightning at the second angel and blew him into pieces, and the bigger ones went into orbit and were turned into comets themselves, so they’d be a reminder to the other angels that whenever God asked for ideas, he expected good ones.”

  Each time her dad told the story, she waited for him to tickle her at this part, or do something equally mood-breaking, so she would know he was only joking. Except he never did, and eventually she came to love that part of the story for the cold nugget of fear that it dropped into the pit of her belly.

  “Finally, one brave, wise angel spoke up and said, ‘May I propose that it be a consensus decision? You, our Father, shall set the terms, which we of the Heavenly Host shall mark and measure…but mostly, it shall be up to them.’

  “God was intrigued—wouldn’t you be? ‘Go on,’ he said.

  “The angel said, ‘We shall build a clock. But not a clock that counts time. We shall build a clock that counts off their sins. You, our Father, shall decide how many that should be. A vast number, I should think, a number beyond the power of their smaller minds to comprehend, so they might not guess it. The clock shall be powered by some of us, who shall watch them, from the greatest among them to the least, and tabulate each sin, and keep the clock ticking toward the number You have determined. ’

  “God gave it some thought, and then smiled. ‘I like it! Get on it!’” More thunder in Jarvis’s voice. “And that’s how the Great Clock in Heaven came to be. It has more dials than you could count, some of them with small hands not much bigger than Popsicle sticks and the biggest ones with hands the size of redwood trees, with gears bigger around than Ferris wheels, and everything’s in constant motion. The hands tick and tock, and they whir, because the clock’s hooked up to angels called Watchers, with millions of eyes that see everything going on down here…they don’t miss a trick, those angels…and for every sin, that’s another tick of the smallest hands on the smallest dials, and they’re moving so fast you can’t see them. But every time around brings us closer to the Day of Days.