LIFE NEAR THE BONE
A Trilogy of Horror Stories
By
BILLIE SUE MOSIMAN
Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman, 2012, All Rights Reserved
Life Near the Bone (the short story)
Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 1993, All Rights Reserved
First published in PREDATORS, edited by Ed Gorman, Martin Greenberg, at ROC, a Division of New American Library, 1993
LIFE NEAR THE BONE
"Where do you think life's sweetest?" Jeff Castain stood next to overflowing shelves with a book open in his hands.
"Where? Deep inside a woman who's stacked like a movie star. Let's say she owns an exercise gym. Yeah . . . that's where it's sweetest." Jeff's roommate was bent over at the waist towel-drying freshly shampooed hair.
"It says right here," Jeff said, ignoring Greg's worthless comment, pointing to a page in the book, "that 'It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.' I believe that."
"Near the bone? What's that supposed to mean? Unless it's the pelvic bone he's talking about." He chuckled at his own sexist wit.
"Henry David Thoreau said this. I don't think he was talking about a woman's anatomy."
"Still. I don't get it. It's all mumbo-jumbo to me." Greg slung the damp towel over the back of a slouch-backed easy chair and plopped down in it. He hiked up one foot onto the lip of the cushion and began pulling at his toenails, ripping them off in slivers one by one.
Jeff moved from the bookcases and lay down on the sofa. He propped the book on his chest so as to block the view of his roommate's disgusting hygiene habits. Filthy man, he thought. I'll have to go behind him and sweep the nails from the carpet and put them in the trash. It's like picking up baby shit, doesn't he know that?
"Is Thoreau your philosopher-of-choice this week?" Greg asked.
It was obvious by Greg's tone of voice he didn't care about the answer. Jeff almost failed to respond, but then decided he had taken quite enough sarcasm for one night, friend or no friend.
"I think that's unfair," he said. "I don't go around picking philosophies the way someone collects porcelain dogs. Or the way you collect those stupid arty-farty posters."
Greg paused in the ripping off of a bit of ragged nail from his big toe. He frowned over at the supine Jeff. "Low blow. Okay, maybe I'm just being an asshole. Sorry. Quote all the Thoreau you want, what do I care."
"Thanks for giving your divine permission." Jeff sulked behind Thoreau's Walden and would not say anything else.
All during the following day, Jeff read and pondered Thoreau's book. No matter how ringing and clear and intriguing the pages he read, he kept coming back to that one quote, nagging at it, taking it apart and putting it together again, trying to make it solely his property.
How does one get near enough to the bone so that life would be sweet? There stood the question, this towering, incomprehensible question that might drive him mad if he let it.
For life, at this juncture, was sour and smelling of decay; a desperate air clung to him, fumed off his clothes no matter how often he changed them. It rolled off him in waves from his pores.
He decided that must be the reason the job interviews went badly. They could detect his desperation, maybe smell it the way he did, that fetid stench of rotting peaches left in neglect on a drain-board for a month.
Not his fault he'd lost his job. Houston had been good for him when he'd first moved here from the moribund Gary, Indiana. These were boom times and jobs were for the picking and money flowed faster than a flooding bayou. But feast always gave way to famine and so it was for the city that boasted itself the jewel of the Southwest. He had clung to his managerial position at the Boston Whaler dealership for as long as he could. Why blame him for loss of sales and a slumping profit margin?
But they did. And he was out. And he was not coming in until he could find a job more rewarding than shoveling burgers out of a Jack in the Box, thank you, Charlie Brown. You wouldn't catch him demeaning himself for minimum wage. He still had--he glanced at his fingers and from a balled fist flicked out one finger at a time counting the weeks—six weeks before his unemployment check was cut off.
He'd find something worthwhile before then. Wouldn't he? The possibility that he might never find work again left a little knot of fear tingling in his belly. He began to perspire, to smell himself. Needed a shower. Needed to think.
Think about getting to the bone where life was sweet again, where it wouldn't matter fate had turned, where he might again discover his lost self-respect.
Around three in the afternoon, just before Greg came home from work at Bayshore Hospital, Jeff found a clue in Thoreau. It was like encountering an old, long-lost friend, for immediately he remembered part of the quote from high school literature books.
"Our life is frittered way by detail...Simplify, simplify."
So that's how it's done, Jeff realized. That's how you get down to the pure, gleaming skeleton of existence and find peace. So obvious. He had been trying too hard, running too fast, and complicating his world unnecessarily.
Simplify...
#
"What are you doing?"
"Isn't it apparent? I'm ridding my life of detail and clutter."
Greg turned down the volume on the television where a married couple was sparring on a sitcom. He went to Jeff and stooped near him on the floor by the stereo. "What are you going to do with those albums?"
"The Dumpster. It's all for the trash man."
"But Jeff, you've had some of those albums since we were in college together. Why would you get rid of them now? Some you'll never find again, not in the original."
Jeff paused and looked at the cover of an early Jimi Hendrix album. This one had belonged to his older sister. May she find peace in her sumptuous, overcomplicated, frivolous life. He placed it with some care on the top of other albums in a cardboard box. It wasn't worth a weary sigh, really. Just junk. Really. He wouldn't miss it.
"I don't want them anymore. I've lugged stuff around for years, that's the point, Greg. I'm through with all that. I'm simplifying my life."
"But ..."
Jeff dumped the rest of the albums into the box and he smiled beatifically at his friend before going to the shelves lining the far wall. He turned his back and began pulling out volumes and stacking them in piles on the floor at his feet.
"Now what are you up to?"
"More clutter. Got to go."
"Your library!" Greg squeaked, coming to his feet.
"Don't need it. It's just littering the place up. Books are dust catchers; everything I own does nothing for me but gather dust."
"Now Jeff, you know I don't give a good goddamn about books. I wouldn't read one if my life depended on it, but you read all the time. If you throw all these books out what are you going to read?"
Jeff just said one word—"Thoreau"—and continued hauling the bound titles from the shelves to stacks on the floor.
Greg grabbed up Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and held it to his chest. "Jeff, I don't understand any of this. You love books. You're a glutton for books. How can you give them up this way? And your music. I don't know what this means..."
Jeff turned all in a rush. He flourished two thick books by Dostoevsky in front of Greg's face. "Garbage!"
Greg, startled, backed immediately out of range.
"Can't you get it? Haven't you been listening to me" Sudden rage spiraled upward like a tornado swirling between the two friends. "Thoreau says that luxuries and comforts of life are not indispensable. They're hindrances to the elevation of mankind! Can't you see that? Are you blind as well as deaf? Are you a total fucking mindless vegetable?"
Greg carefully replaced the Miller book on top of on
e of the stacks and slunk away to the far side of the living room where he took up a watchful pose in the easy chair. He began to chew his fingernails to still the quake inside his chest. It didn't seem to bring an instant of relief.
#
Greg stumbled home from a double shift at the hospital so tired even his eyeballs ached. He saw that this framed posters had disappeared from the wall behind the television set. At any other time this would have served to make him go into a rant, but he was too tired to do more than search for Jeff and ask for an explanation. He would put in a mild protest and retrieve the posters, hang them again.
At Jeff's bedroom door he paused on the threshold. Jeff stood emptying his chest of drawers into a Glad trash bag. While his back was to the door, Greg glanced quickly around. The Navajo rug his friend had bought on a visit to Santa Fe had been rolled in a corner. The covers on the bed were missing except for one rumpled sheet and a bare pillow. The lampshade...the lampshade! Crumpled on the floor. Looked stomped. This frightened Greg more than any of the other evidence that his friend was losing it. Greg couldn't guess the import of the shade unless Jeff meant to live in the unprotected glare of a light bulb.
This was decidedly going too far. He must intervene the way they taught at the hospital outpatient alcohol clinics. Sometimes people had to intervene and risk getting their asses kicked if they saw someone they loved descending into perilous territory.
Now Jeff was methodically discarding his clothes. Would he go naked?
Jeff finally chose to keep two, rather than three, pairs of of jockey shorts. All he needed was a change while one was washed and drying. He bundled up the rest of the underwear into his arms, ready to stuff it all into the rapidly filling bag. He saw Greg in the door. .
"Hey there. You know what? I've been thinking about you pulling those double shifts. It's crazy, man. It's unenlightened. I told you what Thoreau said about luxuries and comforts. Wanting things is a trap. Once inside the trap, you never get free. The jaws lock down tight. Here you are working sixteen hours straight so you can afford that Camaro you just bought and those nights on the town with your girl and..."
"Jeff?"
"Yeah?" He tamped down the clothes in the Glad bag, grinning all the while.
"What did you do with my posters?"
"Oh those. I put them in your room. You really should think about doing away with that kind of stuff. It just drags you down, drags you down."
"Jeff, I think it's time you saw someone. Dr. Bronsky over at Bayshore's pretty good. I'll get him to give you a professional discount and . . ."
"Fuck you!"
Vehement. Aggressive. Even Jeff's good-natured temper was rapidly vanishing.
"C'mon Jeff, I'm serious. This is getting way out of hand. Look at you. You're throwing away your clothes, for chrissakes."
"Not everything. I'm keeping two pairs of jeans and two shirts. That's all I need. What do I need all these clothes for?"
"For starters, maybe you'd need them for a job. For going to interviews to get a job."
"Go away." Jeff turned his back, pulled out the bottom drawer of the chest and hauled out folded summer shorts and sports shirts.
"I can't, Jeff. I have to try to do something."
Jeff halted in his pawing through the drawer. He said quietly, "If you don't go away right now, I won't be responsible for what happens."
"Are you threatening me now?"
"I hear a different drummer, Greg. If you don't hear it, fine, but don't interfere. Now go away."
Jeff didn't want to go, but he didn't want to stay either. He waited only until his friend turned slowly, ominously, and he saw the look of a nervous zealot, the mad, staring look of a monk holding a flame, ready to immolate himself with the cleansing holy fire. Then he knew he must leave. There was nothing he could do. Jeff had ventured too far over the edge and he was falling without a net.
#
He had to call from the living room, too fearful to tell Jeff anything to his face ever again. "I'm moving out, Jeff " He waited. "Do you hear me? I'm going to pack my shit and I'm outta here. You're sick, Jeff. I'm not staying with you any longer when you won't listen to me, when you won't go for help. You're dangerous. Don't you realize that? You've been throwing away stuff for a week."
"Fuck you," he heard Jeff call back furiously. "Fuck you and the Gucci-Rolex-BMW-Beverly Hills horse you rode in on. I don't need you around anyway! You're nothing but a prostitute. You sold out the day you were born."
#
Jeff Castain gradually came to enjoy life again. It seemed as if he had been on a quest for the Grail and found it embedded in the pure, clean stone of Thoreau's noble philosophy. He had been walking through trash, stumbling, lost, and now he could see the path before him.
He read: "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." From this he deduced that Greg's leaving was ordained; it helped him unearth order in a disorderly universe. He had never loved him or anything, not truly. They were just friends for a while, and who turned out to be a traitor to all that was good and right and just? So what if he proved to be the Asshole of the World, the turncoat, the Philistine?
The apartment was shaping up. Looking good. He rubbed his palms together in contentment. In the living room he'd gotten rid of everything but one kitchen straight-backed chair, an unadorned fruit crate from the Safeway, and his precious copy of Walden.
In the kitchen he'd thrown out everything but one plate, one knife, one pan. He ate from cans mostly so what was the point of owning dinnerware and drawers full of silverware and cabinets full of cooking utensils? He saw his landlady scuttle to the Dumpster and take the electric grill and the popcorn popper. Crazy old bitch. Frivolous, frowzy pack rat.
His bedroom was a spare cell now and he loved it. It was a helluva chore to lug the bed from the apartment down the stairs and out back to the Dumpster, but, sweating and swearing, he'd managed. The floor was immensely more comfortable after a few nights. He hardly ached at all anymore when he woke. He thought the Spartan idea converged well with Thoreau's philosophy so he incorporated it into his new life modality.
He had the phone company disconnect his telephone at week's end. Greg kept calling and the job agencies too. What a fucking nuisance; what a bore. He didn't need a job. His needs were too few to demand a real income. When the unemployment check ran out, he'd apply for welfare. If they wouldn't let him have it, he'd go on the streets. It meant nothing to him one way or the other.
Thoreau said: "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."
Jeff embraced that to mean he must let the world flow past. In the apartment, on the street, wherever he found himself, it didn't matter. He carried solitude with him like an envelope in his pocket and no one could divest him of it ever again. They didn't even know he had it!
He patted his shirt pocket as if solitude really was a thing of dimension and weight and it belonged to him alone.
It was not until a month later that Jeff found the quote that would change his life and get him down to the nub of existence. He'd still been searching for the place next to the bone, scraping and scraping away society's frills until he could feel the knife screeching somewhere far off in the dim nether reaches of the fog that had come to surround his days.
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
That is what he came upon in his diligent study and when he found it, he knew then he was nearly home free through the twilight of his ignorance. He heard clarion bells ringing on the reading aloud of that sentence. He shivered with anticipation at the coming understanding that crept forth from the dark corner shadows of his barren apartment. That understanding, when it took him, would rend the foundations of his misery and bring him down to the bone, down past the slime and corruption--the gate!--of flesh that barred the way.
#
"Hello, Mrs. Whipshaw."
"Jeff, how nice of you to visit. Won'
t you come in?"
The old woman who had nabbed the grill and the popcorn popper from the trash Dumpster let her tenant inside the dank, bird-shit-splattered living room. A white cockatiel flew through the air in protest, wings flapping wildly.
"Pay no attention to Potto. He's a spoiled brat and isn't used to polite company. Hush, Potto! Behave now."
Jeff declined to sit in the newspaper-covered chintz chair Mrs.Whipshaw gestured he take. He stood with his hands behind his back, smiling the stiff smile of the Buddha, the smile of the Inscrutable. His gaze flicked around the room and soon his smile evaporated, replaced by a sneer of disgust. White smears of Potto's crap covered the drapes, dripped down the neck of a brass table lamp, lay in dried yellow-streaked plops on top of the furniture. It looked as if an insane painter had come, and in a frenzy, swung a wet brush around and around to create a barbarous nightmare of interior decoration.
"I haven't seen you out of your apartment in ever so long," Mrs. Whipshaw said, shooing the contentious bird from her shoulder.
Jeff watched the cockatiel closely to see where it might light down. It hung upside down from the silent dust-layered ceiling fan and screeched at him, one eye cocked in his direction. "I haven't been out much," Jeff said, once reassured the bird was not coming to him.
He felt a nausea rising and had to swallow bitter gorge. It tasted of the kidney beans he'd consumed the night before. Sickening. Eating--an odious habit. Made people into worms. Scoop it in, shit it out, round and round she goes, where she stops no one knows...
"What happened to your nice friend, that Greg boy? Did he really move out?"
"Posters," Jeff said by way of explanation.
"What's that, dear?"
Jeff crossed the room, his eye trained on the bird, as he came for Mrs. Whipshaw with the one knife he'd saved for cutting tough meat.
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