The Shape of Bones

by Daniel Galera

  The Joker came climbing the stairs with a monstrous grin cutting his pimply face in half. Hermano hadn’t seen his descent, but the smile said it all. He soon saw that the general consensus was that the Joker had been the best so far.

  Hermano asked to ride again right after the Joker, disrupting the prearranged order. The challenge was implicit. Authorization was granted.

  Instead of positioning himself at the top of the stairs, the official start line, Hermano leaned his bike against a post and started to pace the pavement, looking for something on the ground. He found a few abandoned bricks in the grass. Mononucleosis asked what he was doing, if he was going to go or not. Hermano didn’t answer. He just placed the bricks on the kerb, creating a small step between the street and the pavement. One by one, the conversations all stopped and people turned to watch Hermano. He asked two of Bonobo’s friends to move off the top of the stairs. Bonobo had stopped kissing the blonde and was watching too. When Hermano began pushing his bike up the street, his intention became clear to those watching. ‘This ain’t going to end well,’ muttered the Joker under his breath. Hermano walked about fifty yards uphill, stopped, got on his bike and began to pedal as hard as he could towards the stairs. As he passed Bonobo, he looked him right in the eye. Now he was paying attention. Now Bonobo would see. He used the brick step to help him on to the pavement and when he launched into his descent he was already travelling at a high speed. He continued pedalling with all his might. No one would ever ride that track as fast as he was riding it now. It was impossible. He felt as if his wheels weren’t even touching the ground. The world around him became a blur and the wind made his eyes water. In the first few seconds, he realized the bike was already out of his control. But even so he kept pedalling harder and harder. He knew he was going to fall. And everyone was going to see him fall. On the way down, he understood that the only thing motivating him to ride that track so many times was the possibility of a fall, the chance he might really hurt himself. And this would be the most spectacular of all falls. It was what he had to say to the people at the top of the stairs. He was ready to bleed. It was his talent. If Bonobo was capable of beating up twenty people at once, now he was capable of cutting, breaking, grazing, flaying, scraping, fracturing, scratching, perforating and crushing his own body in a way that no one would ever forget. As he rode over the hump halfway down, Hermano pulled up on the handlebars, launching the bike into the air. He landed fifty yards down. The force of the impact made the handlebars swivel all the way to the right and the bike was thrown to the left, landing on the stone steps. Cyclist and bike went tumbling down the stairs. There was no pain, just the feeling of being completely out of control, which brought more resignation than panic. His body was battered in turns by stone steps, steel tubes and rubber tyres. It was almost like catching a wave, body surfing. All he could think of was a scene from a movie: the last of the V8 interceptors rolling in the apocalyptic desert, bouncing and spinning as if in an Olympic gymnastics solo, projecting sheets of sand against the light-blue sky, and seconds later the road warrior emerges from the wreck with a bloody face, a terrible eye injury and a wounded arm, and drags himself out of the car and over the scalding sand, which sticks to his blood, to his open wounds, and the murderous motorcycle gang races down the hill towards him to see if he’s still alive, and he is, seriously injured and covered in blood and abandoned, but you can see him and imagine yourself in his place. When his own body stopped rolling, Hermano raised his hands to his face, then pulled them back and there he was, in the broad palms of his hands, in his thick, strong fingers. People were running down the stairs towards him. His enemies racing down the hill to see if he was still alive. Spectators running to save the hero of the movie. His movie. The scene was perfect. The make-up couldn’t have been more realistic. Blood is such a beautiful thing, he thought before he blacked out.

  Samara was stroking her son’s forehead with the tips of her fingers. It was only nine o’clock at night and he told her he wanted to sleep but was finding it hard, because during the holidays he was used to going to bed after midnight and it was still too early. He wasn’t sleepy, but he wanted to sleep. A small part of his scalp, near his forehead, had been shaved and was sporting a bandage. There were several pretty ugly scrapes and scratches on his body too, some Mercurochrome-orange, and his wrist was broken. Samara was certain that her son was in pain and wanted to stop him from feeling it, but he swore that he could hardly feel a thing and that he was fine, all he wanted to do was go to sleep and wake up the next morning. She thought about mentioning the red spots she’d found in the bathroom, but sensed that they had their origin in something her son didn’t want to talk about. She didn’t feel close enough to him to broach the subject. She gave up trying to fathom out his feelings and secret actions and decided to focus on the sleep problem. Perhaps that was something she could solve.

  ‘Remember how I used to make you sleep when you were younger?’

  Hermano remembered. His mother’s fingers on his forehead felt really nice. His injuries itched more than they hurt.

  ‘Imagine you’re climbing some stairs, very slowly.’ Samara spoke languidly, stretching out each word, as if she herself were sleepy.

  Before closing his eyes, Hermano took a good look at his mother. When he closed them, he put himself in her place, imagining that he was the woman sitting on the edge of the bed, observing her son. It began as a quick, involuntary exercise of the imagination, then he realized he was unable to exit her point of view.

  ‘And at the top of the stairs … there is … a cloud …’

  He felt, or at least thought he could feel, exactly what she was feeling as she tucked into bed, like a child, her fifteen-year-old son, who’d suffered an ugly bike accident that afternoon and had blacked out and been carried home by his friends and taken to the emergency room, where his wrist had been bandaged and he’d received two external and two internal stitches in his head, where there was a cut so deep the doctor had said he could see his skull.

  ‘A lovely soft white cloud … you want to sink into it.’

  He remembered all the other times she had made him fall asleep like that, when he was afraid to go to sleep because he couldn’t stop thinking there was a zombie lurking somewhere in his room, in the dark, every night, even when he told himself there was no such thing as zombies and that his fear was ridiculous. The zombie had a crazy face, smiled with bulging eyes and babbled that it was hungry for brains, like in a movie he’d seen on videotape when he was seven or eight years old, with Bricky, who at the time was better known as Túlio. He thought about all the time his mother, and his father too, had devoted to him over the years. The enormity of the investment. He saw it all at once, the whole fifteen years of money and time and attention and sacrifice that his parents had dedicated to him. It was such a strange thing to imagine.

  ‘You climb on to the cloud … make yourself comfortable, nice and cosy. It smells like fabric softener …’

  There was his mother’s voice, repeating the technique she had used when he was a child to bring on sleep, but it wasn’t working. He wasn’t growing sleepy; in fact he was feeling more and more awake, his mind increasingly agitated.

  ‘Your eyes are growing heavy … your body’s really relaxed, you’re sinking into the cloud …’

  He wanted to get up and go out to find his friends and talk about the fall, about what had happened at the emergency room. To be the centre of attention for a few minutes. But with his newly acquired ability to put himself in his mother’s shoes, he imagined how frustrating it would be for her if he told her he didn’t feel like sleeping any more and, in fact, wanted to go out. Then he imagined what she would feel if he really did fall asleep.

  ‘And on this cloud is the word …’

  He wanted her to feel what he imagined she would feel.

  ‘Sleep …’

  He pretended to be asleep.

  6.23 A.M.

  His daughter’s name made him realize
where, in fact, he was driving. For the first time, he felt comfortable enough to admit to himself that he didn’t like the name. He thought it was ugly – the very name he had practically forced his wife to accept, after much insistence and fictitious justifications. ‘Nara,’ he said out loud, and the sound of the word sent a vibration running through a membrane in his mind that held a dense concentration of unfulfilled possibilities, set aside for one reason or another in favour of others that had come to fruition. The name evoked a diffuse, not entirely pleasant feeling of nostalgia, which he felt he had entered physically as he left the last repaved stretch of Aparício Borges Avenue, which became Teresópolis Avenue, which was still undergoing roadworks for a few hundred yards until it gave way to a scenario that looked preserved, with the same old-fashioned tarmac and central reservations with enormous trees that he had seen frequently until some five years earlier, when he still lived in the southern suburbs and often drove that way. He fantasized that the interminable thoroughfare was chasing him and he was now racing it in his car, as he had already raced cloud shadows on highways. Like a pyroclastic flow, the concrete of the new avenues feeding into the Terceira Perimetral advanced like a giant wave engulfing the tarmac, pavements, trees, bus stops and vehicles behind him, and he had to step on the accelerator and get to Esplanada before it was too late. If the concrete caught up with him, he too would turn to concrete, and this time it would make no difference if Nara squealed and tickled him, he would be forever imprisoned in that monochromatic landscape, like the plaster cast of a victim of Pompeii, or Han Solo in the opening sequence of The Return of the Jedi. Teresópolis Avenue quickly became Nonoai Avenue, which became Eduardo Prado Avenue, a still-dormant stretch on which the urban sprawl of the last five years had left a variety of marks, though all relatively superficial. Decadent motels, food carts announcing bacon-and-cheese specials, and a few plots of vacant land gave way to small supermarkets, low-income housing, and Assembly of God churches with enormous signs exclaiming ‘Stop Suffering!’, although their doors were closed at six-thirty on a Saturday morning, an hour at which, it appeared, few people suffered. When the road began to climb, he anticipated the roundabout a quarter of a mile uphill, where he’d have to take a left on the narrow paved road to the semi-rural district of Vila Nova, where, on a small property surrounded by peach plantations, Renan was probably just waking up after a night of goodbye sex with Keyla, which he would describe over the course of the day in excessive detail. It was an awful habit of Renan’s. Once, during a night training session at Condor, he had swung up to grab the last hold of a difficult route on the negative wall. His hand had touched the hold, but he’d forgotten to use magnesium and his sweaty hand had slipped. Renan, who was responsible for safety, should have been paying attention to what was going on, but was instead recounting in gynaecological detail his favourite student, whom he’d finally laid, and was a split second late engaging the belay device. He’d narrowly escaped a trip straight to Intensive Care with a crushed face. Even worse was that Renan had showed no sign of recognizing his imprudence. They were partners, but they couldn’t have been more different climbers. Renan had already been second in the Brazilian ranking. He was the coordinator of the Technical Commission of the Rio Grande do Sul Mountain Climbing Association. A professional climber. But there was something disagreeable about the way he related to the sport, always seeking little victories and achievements, obsessed with the degree of difficulty of each climb he undertook, on a constant quest for the best time, the first 10b route in Brazil’s south, the first 100 per cent natural climb on this or that rock, the first to ‘do’ each new female student that came to the Condor for a few trial lessons, and now his dream was to be the first to climb Cerro Bonete in the Bolivian Andes. Even his friend’s physique was somewhat presumptuous and vulgar, with his angular, bulging muscles, his body devoid of fat, his triangular face ending in a pointy chin. It was vanity that took Renan to the top, but there was a brutal contradiction between excessive vanity and a sport like climbing. Contrary to Renan, he considered climbing first and foremost a kind of meditation, an exercise in self-knowledge extended to each of the body’s two hundred and twelve muscles. It wasn’t strength or impulsiveness that made someone climb a rock, it was a much more delicate wisdom, a complex economy of muscular effort and balance, a dance of contraction and repose led by a mind that was focused and disconnected from everything that was not body or rock. He flipped on the indicator several yards before the roundabout, but when he got to the turn-off to Renan’s house he drove straight past it. Instead, he turned off the indicator and stayed on Eduardo Prado. He was pissed off at Renan, but he felt suddenly certain that his own relationship to climbing was also far from ideal. While Renan was motivated by vanity, for him it was an escape. He wanted to believe it was only for the physical and mental conditioning, for the contact with nature that rock climbing fostered, but in reality he was running away. He climbed because deep down he admired Renan. He admired Renan because Renan was everything he wasn’t. And now he saw that he had bought into the idea of the expedition to Cerro Bonete because the summit of Cerro Bonete would always be the opposite of where he was now. In 1923, when George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, his reply was: ‘Because it’s there.’ His own motivation was the opposite. He didn’t want to climb Bonete because the mountain was there, but because he was here. Renan wanted to be able to brag and sell the photographs to a magazine when they got back. Escapism and vanity. There had never been a more misguided pair of climbers. And by not turning left at the roundabout, continuing on and passing in front of the old SinSation Show Club towards the neighbourhood he’d left five years earlier, he believed he was beginning to set things right. The colossal eighty-litre camping backpack rolling again in the boot was a useless burden. ‘Go ahead and sleep,’ he said out loud, as if Renan could hear him. ‘Stay in bed till eleven, which is a much more acceptable hour, isn’t it?’ After passing over two consecutive electronic road bumps under the speed limit, he let the Montero cruise down a long, serene slope. The silence began to bother him for the first time since he’d left home. He turned on the sound system, unable to remember what CD was in it. He immediately recognized Elomar’s guitar, followed by his voice. From far away on the great journey, overburdened I stop to rest. He suddenly remembered his dream from the night before, after hours of tossing and turning, unable to get to sleep: he was driving his car in fast-moving traffic on a busy avenue. Beside him, in the passenger seat, was Adri. In the back were Renan and Walrus, a childhood friend he hadn’t seen for some fifteen years and whom he had no reason to remember, not even in a dream. The traffic was annoying him. The others were silent. It wasn’t clear where they were going. There was a bang, and in the rear-view mirror he saw black smoke billowing from his back tyre. He was forced to pull over to see what had happened. Everyone got out and they stood there a while, staring at the tyre, unable to comprehend what kind of mechanical flaw might have caused it. The landscape stretching away from the avenue was like the sort that runs alongside country highways, a sloping landfill giving way to a vast tract of swampy land. He was distracted by the landscape for a moment, until he heard the drone of the Montero’s engine: someone had stolen the car while no one was looking. He barely had time to think about what to do when another vehicle, an older saloon that might have been a Del Rey or a Monza, pulled over and offered them a lift to a police station or something like that. They climbed in, Renan in front, Adri, Walrus and himself in the back, while the driver, who had no striking physical features, drove in silence. When they reached their destination, it wasn’t a police station, but a simple house in a working-class neighbourhood, with plaster eczema peering through the worn white paint and a raggedy little lawn out front. Thinking they’d been kidnapped, they obeyed the driver’s instructions and went inside, where they found themselves in a large living room with thirty or forty people in it, men, women and children. Some were standing, but most were sitting on
brown imitation-leather sofas or on the floor, on fluffy rugs, in circles or half circles. At least half a dozen of those present were wearing identical navy-blue T-shirts, without patterns or brand names, all oversized, as if someone had mistakenly ordered extra-large. It was obvious from the outset that these uniformed individuals were monitors or organizers of some sort, moving people from place to place, looking around, coordinating games, and giving talks to small groups of attentive listeners. The driver came and handed them some pamphlets whose content made it clear that the activities taking place belonged to a strange school of self-help with religious overtones. They felt awkward mingling and taking part in the activities, but it was clear to them that the whole thing wasn’t just bait, but also a façade for something menacing. He tried to convince Renan that they should do something, and Adri began to protest and attack the monitors and students with sarcastic remarks. Renan was sucked in and joined one of the study groups on some sofas. By now, Walrus had disappeared. He was afraid to defy the monitors, but Adri opposed them openly, which heightened the tension in the house. The monitors exchanged serious looks, as if planning to take some kind of drastic action. He called Adri over and whispered in her ear, explaining that it was better to go along with things and pretend to be participating in that circus, because they could be in serious danger if they didn’t. She agreed and they sat on some armchairs, observing what was going on around them. The monitors’ speech was extremely artificial. The fact that they weren’t what they appeared to be, that they in fact had a much more sinister agenda than offering life lessons and religious teachings to all those people, was evident to the two of them and no one else. His teeth seemed to be pressing on one another in his mouth, as if he were grinding them, or as if his wisdom teeth were crowding his other teeth with abnormal force. He opened his mouth wide, and his jaws popped, but the discomfort remained. He began to recognize some of the people in the room. He saw Keyla, some fellow climbers from Condor, and a few patients he’d seen or operated on in the last three years. He saw Jade, a seventeen-year-old girl whose breasts he’d augmented with 275cc implants, despite his insistence that it was totally unnecessary in a young woman with such a lovely, harmonious body, and he also recognized Liliana Caliope, largely responsible for establishing his precocious reputation as a miracle-worker, an equine 52-year-old socialite who swore to anyone who would listen that she had been reborn after his advanced surgical interventions, and who had tried for months to compensate him for his services with much warmer, more intimate payments than those from her inexhaustible bank balance. And only then, scanning the room for more familiar faces, did he notice that there were TV sets everywhere, on tables and in wall cabinets. He was pretty sure they hadn’t been there before and that they’d been surreptitiously installed by the monitors. They were large flat-screen TVs, about thirty-three inches. The screens suddenly lit up, but instead of a programme or a grainy screen indicating a lack of signal, they gave off an intense white light that pulsed slightly, casting a phantasmagorical luminescence over people and furniture. Slowly, calmly, everyone present, except the monitors, began to flock around the TV sets. He instinctively knew he had to stay away from them at all costs, as they represented an indescribable threat. The pressure of his teeth in his mouth was growing stronger and more painful. He lost sight of Adri, but his fear of the TVs trumped any other concern. He crouched behind sofas and tried to slip away unnoticed through a series of corridors and recesses, but he kept coming across more and more TV sets, and a long, terrifying part of the dream was taken up with his interminable escape until he entered a room and saw yet another glowing screen with a small group huddled around it. Suddenly it flashed and the faces of the people in front of it disappeared. They were replaced with smooth, black, expressionless surfaces. The same thing began to happen to all the TVs and the people around them, the same flash and the same defacement. He tried to get away, trying to keep a distance from all the TVs, but he was blinded by a flash that came out of nowhere. When he opened his eyes again, dazed, he realized he was somewhere else. The ground was hard, and the panoramic view took in faraway fields and hills. He was standing on a bare, slippery rock, moistened by recent rain. He recognized the place when he saw a large white cross at one end of the rock. He was on top of Cruz Rock, in the company of dozens of other people, everyone who had been at the house of TVs and many more. The people were more or less organized in a long queue, and after rubbing his eyes and looking more closely, he could see they were all mutilated or injured in some way. There were men with missing limbs, fat women with multiple stab wounds in their backs, people riddled with bullets, pieces of flesh hanging from their bodies, disfigured, burned. The queue moved slowly towards one edge of the boulder. When they got there, monitors in the same navy-blue T-shirts strapped each person into a rappel seat, attached a figure eight and passed a rope through it. One by one, they turned and took careful steps backwards into the void, beginning a descent down a bottomless cliff face. Renan was among them, his left femur exposed. The driver who had picked them up from the side of the road reappeared in front of him. When he went to speak to the man, it felt as if his mouth were full of loose teeth. He started spitting them out, first one by one, then the molars and premolars and canines and incisors all came out together in a syrup of crystalline saliva that contained no traces of blood. He ran his tongue over his gums and felt the holes left by his teeth, sensitive but not painful. The pressure was gone, his jaw felt loose and flexible, and the cold air in his mouth brought a sense of relief. Free of his teeth, he began to understand what was going on. ‘How did it happen?’ he asked the driver, who was still standing next to him. ‘A fall. About six hundred feet. Problem with the rope.’ ‘Thanks,’ he said, and headed to the cliff, where he joined the mutilated crowd. The dream finished there. He hadn’t remembered a dream in such detail for a long time. He didn’t feel a need to interpret it. If someone had asked him at that moment what it meant, he wouldn’t have been able to answer, but he knew that its meaning had already been incorporated into his awareness, diluted in his flow of thought. Now a single detail caught his attention. What had Walrus been doing in the dream? He hadn’t thought about him for years; never had a truly memorable experience with him. Just then, he remembered that it actually hadn’t been fifteen years since he’d last seen Walrus. He’d run into him once, about three or four years earlier. Where had it been? At a restaurant. That was right. At a popular pizza parlour. Back then he couldn’t afford to splurge on expensive restaurants, but every now and then he’d be dragged to a place like that by friends. He’d gone to the till to pay and there had been a fat guy in front of him. It had taken him a moment to recognize Wallace Wissler. His childhood friend was wearing a real leather jacket that smelled new, jeans and yellow trainers. His face was still spherical, though slightly longer, and the rat’s moustache and sparse beard of the old days had become a straight-lined goatee the exact width of his chin. They had talked for two minutes. Walrus had started out as a trainee with a small web design company in the mid nineties. Just over a year later he’d started his own business with a friend. He’d begun designing basic three-page websites for clients such as bakeries, video rental shops and distributors of orthopaedic supplies, and his company, Stunt, was now responsible for the webpages of a bank, a telecommunications giant and an impressive portfolio of multinationals, celebrities, political parties and institutions. He was accompanied by his wife, a blonde who would never need plastic surgery in her life. In their two-minute conversation, Walrus asked if he was still in touch with other friends from Esplanada, and mentioned a few absurd-sounding nicknames. As he left the pizza parlour, he saw Walrus turning off the alarm of the latest model BMW estate. That was the last time he’d seen him. Nevertheless, his presence in the dream was odd. On the other hand, it made sense, a lot of sense. After all, it was to the stamping ground of his youth that he was driving now, taking a left on Juca Batista. Oh new moon, would that I could see her, at the dawn of it a
ll, in the lost era, on a highway morn, and start all over. Elomar’s song was nearing the end, and he was nearing Esplanada.