I cross the street. I walk out into the city, sticky humid and shooting heat up at me from the pavement. I can feel my hands getting slick with sweat. I hold onto my skull a little tighter. I really do not want to drop it. If you drop your skull and it breaks, what does that mean? I know about out-of-body experiences, but this would be something else. This would be looking down at the pieces of me and knowing that they’re broken because my fingers slipped. And I wouldn’t get to move on—I’d be here, and I’d have to get up tomorrow and live with the knowledge that I shattered my own skull, and there it is, pieces of it being ground into the pavement as people walk over it.
I decide to go to a bar. A man walks into a bar carrying a human skull—sounds like a good setup for a joke. So what’s the punchline?
The bar is cool and dim and not very crowded. I like it. There’s a rough edge at the place where my nose used to be, the place where the cartilage would meet the bone, and I rub my thumb over it like I’m trying to smooth it out. The man behind the bar—head bald and shining—nods at me as I take a seat.
I put my skull on the bar and he looks at it.
"It’s okay," I say. "It’s mine." I order a beer and he brings it to me, and he doesn’t ask any questions. If he’s been doing this job for long enough, could be he’s learned when not to ask, and I’m not sure what he would ask me anyway.
The woman sitting to my left leans over. "Is that thing real?" So she has an idea of what to ask, I guess.
I nod and I say it is, and I repeat that it’s mine, which seems like an important detail, because it’s the main reason I have it at all. If the man on the beach had held out someone else’s skull, there’s no way I would have taken it. The woman whistles. She has blond hair that looks like it’s been bleached fifteen or twenty times, the very color and texture of straw.
"That’s really something. Crazy. You just gonna carry it around?"
I shrug. I wish I could explain to her how all of your options dry up and seem pointless next to the smooth, familiar curve of your own cranium in the palm of your hand. That curve swings around and across everything possible in your life, cutting it off like a knife. The longer it stays with me, the less I know what I’m doing.
"Wild," she says, and lifts the glass in front of her to her lips, tosses her head back, and half of whatever had been in it is gone. She does this in an easy, thoughtless way, the kind of way that makes me sure that I’m sitting in the presence of an experienced drinker. I like that, too. I like people who can be professional about whatever it is they do. I tap my fingers on the polished ridge of my brow, and I follow her example and I drink.
I’m not sure how much later it is. I’m not sure how many rounds we’ve gone through, me and her and my skull watching the both of us with empty sockets. At some point her hand crept onto my knee and I don’t push it off, because at this point I don’t really feel qualified to turn down whatever else life wants to toss in my direction. I made a choice this morning that seems to have made a lot of other choices easier for me, even as it’s made others even more complicated, and on balance that might be good.
I dip a finger into my glass and let a clear drop of beer fall onto the knitted plates at the top of my head. It rolls down to where my ear used to be and pats softly into the table.
"So now there’s two of you?" she says, half a question and half just a thing she’s saying. I shake my head. This isn’t my entire body, I didn’t die somewhere else and decompose down to the bone. This is just my skull, and I don’t know how it got onto the beach, but it doesn’t seem all that important because now we’re together.
"Maybe after I’m dead, there’ll be two skulls. Then that’ll be right, sort of."
She looks at me and nods as if this makes all the sense in the world to her. Then she stands, pulling the straps of her faded sundress up over her shoulders, and she lays a hand on my skull, and there’s something kind of proprietary in it but I don’t tell her to move it. I don’t think she’d try anything bad. We’ve been talking. She knows how important this is to me.
"Let’s get outta here."
I nod, toss some bills onto the bar, pick up my skull and we head for the heavy wooden door, and when we open it and step out onto the sidewalk the sun is going down, the sky hazy and so brightly orange it almost hurts my eyes. Walking isn’t a problem, not like if I was drunk—because I’m pretty sure I’m not—but my feet feel like they’re not even attached to me, like I’m looking at them from those empty eye sockets, tucked under my own arm, not moving on my own so much as just being carried from place to place. There are people in the street, surging around on foot and in cars, sending noise and exhaust up into the air, but none of it really feels like it has anything to do with me. Beyond the streets and the buildings I can feel the ocean again, like it’s tugging on me in that way that every large thing can. I turn my face toward it and I wonder how long my skull was out there. It’s so smooth, so clean. How many days and nights did it spend in the sand, tiny grains polishing and polishing?
"You’re already thinking about dying?" She startles me when she speaks, and then she surprises me by slipping her arm around mine, my free one. I look at her in the yellow streetlight glow and I wonder how old she is. She looks like she could be any age, though I get the feeling she’s older than me. Her skull is a lot closer to the surface, a lot more like her face. "You’re too young to be doing that, honey."
I look down again at what I’m carrying. "Kind of hard not to."
"You don’t have to take that thing everywhere." She tugs at me, slips her hand into mine and squeezes with her bony fingers, the little knots of her knuckles like tree roots. I’m about to tell her that I do, because it’s mine, so what the hell else should I do with it, but she leans up and kisses me just then, just at the corner of my mouth, and her lips are soft and a little sticky with gloss, and for the few seconds she’s there I forget about the bones under my skin and the bones under hers, and it’s just soft on soft. I almost turn my head. Then I don’t.
"Come on," she says, and when she tugs at me again I go with her, and we walk.
Here in the city, it never really gets dark. The places where the darkness is become a little darker, the shadows more sharply defined, but it never gets dark in the way that I think people mean when they say that. I feel like we’re in a moving spotlight as we head out across the wandering grid of streets, and I don’t know whether I’m pulling us or she’s pulling us or we’re pulling together, or following what’s in my hand like some kind of divining rod pulling us toward water.
So we go back to the water. I think neither of us knows that we’re going there until all of a sudden, there we are, like we teleported there straight from where we began, beamed down like we’re in a science fiction movie. The thing is, I began here at the water, because my skull did. My jawbone is very cool, nestled against my palm.
We stand on the pier. We’re the only ones here, and the moon is still low and it’s the exact same bleached off-white color of bones. I still don’t know the woman’s name, I think, but she lets go of my arm and takes my hand, and I let her. It feels good. We look out together at the moon, the reflection of it all broken up on the water’s surface like stained glass, and I think about the things they say we used to be, little wormy things with stubby legs that crawled out of the water and up into the trees.
"I used to pretend I was a mermaid," she whispers, and I think, You used to be one, we all did, even her with her weird old-young face and her hair like straw, and I still don’t know her name, but it still doesn’t feel like it matters. We used to be them, but then we died, and our bones are what’s left. I never really thought about death before now. It’s like they say: it’s just this thing that happens to other people. Except it isn’t. I’m holding the evidence of that in my hands, something that could have come from the past or the future, or now, right now, because I guess we’re all dying the moment we’re born.
She lets go of my hand, turns and looks at me. S
he’s swaying just a little, and I guess she might be drunk, but her eyes are so clear, so focused, and I can’t look away. She reaches down and rests her fingertips on my skull. I can see her chipped red nail polish shining black in the moonlight.
"You need to get rid of that thing."
I look at her fingers, at the skull, at the way the moon pales her skin into the same color as the bone until they look like they could be all part of the same thing, a mutant on the same order as the wormy things that we used to be, until our shapes changed and we became what we are. I take a slow breath and I move my own fingers up and over the maxilla, zygomatic, lacrimal, nasal, sphenoid. I know it because it’s mine, because it’s the part of me that my self rides around in and it has been since I was born, since before that. The old man with the metal detector and the Red Sox cap had held it out to me and I’d taken it, because you don’t say no to the things that are most completely yours.
But maybe I’m too young to be thinking about death. Or maybe I’m exactly the right age. My fingers touch hers and I think about how her hand had felt in mine, and the softness of the flesh that lies over her mandible and her maxilla.
We all used to be mermaids, until we came up onto the sand. I don’t know if that’s true, but right now it feels like it could be.
"It won’t break," she whispers, and I’m happy that she understands that the issue matters to me. "It’ll be just like giving it back, right?"
I guess that’s right.
For a few more seconds we just stand there alone on the pier with the waves hitting the pilings in a soft woosh woosh and when I feel like I can, I pull away from her and I’m careful, gentle, cradling my skull in my hands like it’s something special, something priceless. Because it is, because it’s mine, and just because I have two of them doesn’t mean it means any less to me.
But really, I think I only need the one. At least for now.
So I wind up like I’m going to throw a football, and I’m conscious of every contracting muscle and every moving joint as I pull back my skull and shove it forward and let it go out into the dark and across that stained glass water. As it goes the moon catches it, frozen in mid-air like another little moon, smaller and dimmer with a face set into it that I know is mine. Then it’s gone.
"Okay," she says. "Okay." And she takes my hand again and squeezes it, but she doesn’t try to pull me away. I can’t see where my skull hit the water. I don’t even know that it did. I never heard a splash. It just arced up and over the broken moonlight and then it disappeared in the dark.
I’m not sure why, but I like not knowing for certain. It could be anywhere. Maybe it was never here at all.
Finally I turn around and she turns with me, and we walk again, back into the city, back away from the water, because we came from there but we can’t go back there, not yet. Someday. I’ve got that to think about, and I’ve got what’s under my skin, and right now I’ve got what’s under hers as well. As soon as we get off the pier and back under the streetlights, I’m going to ask her what her name is. And I’m going to say it back to her with each letter getting its own time, shaping each syllable with my face until I can really feel what it’s like, because I can feel things. Skulls can’t but I can, and that’s an important difference, I think.
That I can do that, that’s mine, too. And I can’t leave it behind.
The Cold Death of Papa November
Every one of the lights of Budapest is an eye, and every one of those eyes is staring at him. He turns his own eyes to the river, ribbon of darkness cutting through a sea of flying photons, but even the river is not dark; tilt your head this way and that, laddie, this way and that and the river looks at him with the reflected gaze of all the lights of the city, his own reflection in the glaze of a dead man’s stare.
This way and that. Hands on the old pocked wood of the balcony door. His fingers slide into depressions barely covered by new paint. Head turning, turning. No peace here. Behind him, the shortwave sits on its little table like a gargoyle, glowering at him with its own inscrutable gaze.
Down on the street five stories below, a crowd of people, laughing, happy. Her voice for a moment, in the way that all voices are her voice, in the way that all gazes are her gaze. The world is haunted by her.
The shortwave crackles and he tenses as if for a blow, not turning.
Achtung. Achtung. Der Achte. Der Zwei. Der Achte. Der Sechste. Der Drei.
A woman. Not her. His shoulders relax into limpness. He looks out at the city and the city looks back, questioning.
So what did you come here for?
*
Home, years ago, months ago, hours and minutes; time is more fluid now than it used to be. He marked the passage of time with breaths, heartbeats; he used hers, because she had mattered that much. Then she was gone, and now he’s alone with his own rhythms, and they stutter and shake. They seem unreliable. Time slips away. His perception is a sieve and the time passes through.
He takes phone calls, at first—sympathies and commiserations that seem like mockery. He doesn’t want to listen, so at last he doesn’t. The phone sits off the hook and he and it sit together in silence. There are pictures of her all over the house, looking at him. Her eyes; his own eyes reflected in hers. He used to kiss her with their eyes open. He used to look into her eyes as their mouths slid together, memorizing each gold fleck, each vein of green, irises like unpolished mineral from the secret heart of a stone.
I love you, she whispers into the silent house, the gathering dark and the gathering dust. What’s happening to you?
He wanders the halls, leans against a wall, slides down to the floor and buries his face in his hands in a vain attempt at sending her away. He wishes he were brave enough to scratch out her eyes.
Love, grief; in a hellish kind of alchemy they transform into hate. The hate turns inward and festers. He is living in a giant wound. He is a giant wound.
He sells the house, and says goodbye to no one when he goes. Before he does, he finds himself in the attic, the contents of an old box strewn out all around him, the old shortwave in his lap. He had forgotten it. He’s not sure now that he remembers it, holding it in his hands as though he’s only seen it before in dreams. The batteries should be dead but it turns on. Dead air. Crackle, shiver, solar breaths, shifting sunspots.
Ready. Ready. Six. One. Two. Five. Eight. Six. Ready. Ready.
The light bulb explodes with a soft pop. He sits there in the dark for a very long time after the voice goes silent. He’s not ready. He never could be.
*
Have you ever seen a lassie, a lassie, a lassie? Have you ever seen a lassie? Start looking, asshole.
Seven eight five one six five seven.
You’re not ready for anything.
*
He hears the song in his dreams. Increasingly, he hears it when awake. He first heard it as most people hear such loose bits of the mass culture, something sung by a relative or on a CD of children’s songs, or in school. He heard it as a small boy and it stayed with him, wedged into the crevices of subconscious and memory. Then many years later he heard it again, crackling and indistinct, echoing weirdly in the bare-wood emptiness of an attic not yet filled with the detritus of years of occupancy.
She had been sitting curled around the radio, holding it to herself like she was cradling the child she wouldn’t ever have. She heard him—a breath, a creaking board, or maybe she just felt the beat of his pulse, the rhythm by which she kept her own time drawing near—and she looked up. Her eyes... that gaze.
Someone else’s gaze.
“I’ll be right down,” she had whispered. The crackling was gone. Somewhere in those moments, breath and heartbeat, she had turned the thing off. “I’ll be right down, I’m just, I’m going through some things. Okay?”
Desperation in that last word. He had felt weirdly ashamed, like he had walked in on her masturbating, except that even that wasn’t something he felt shame regarding anymore. He had turned, left
the attic, and later she hadn’t spoken about it and he supposed he had felt that it was for the best.
I can’t tell you about what I do, she had said the night he asked her to marry him. I just can’t. Okay?
Okay. That same okay. Flash in her eyes like that same empty, alien gaze. Later—or earlier, he’s no longer sure with how malleable the time has gotten—lying in bed in the dark, an empty patch of cool sheet to his left. Single notes in the night, so soft, the lost echoes of a lost child’s music box.
Have you ever seen a lassie. A lassie. A lassie. Have you ever? Seen a lassie?
Go this way and that.
*
When he walks out of the house for the last time, he has the shortwave under his arm. It’s mid-November, and the trees are shaking themselves naked in the rain. He doesn’t look back. There are no lights in the windows of the house, and every one is a dead eye. The worst of them, the attic window, he imagines that he might look back at it and see her there, watching him go, her eyes dark holes in her head.
In his imagination—just a dream, never really happened—she opens her mouth and out come the music-box notes, tinny and lost.
If something happens, she had said once, naked and curled around him, I’ll get a message to you somehow.
Had she been lying?
What are lies? How do you know them when they happen?
Hours later he’s on a plane over the Atlantic, looking out at a blessedly eyeless dark—except for his own gaze reflected dimly back to him, and his eyes look empty as the night outside.
Singing With All My Skin and Bone Page 12