Breath and Bones (41 page)

“A stethoscope,” she repeated dutifully.

“Yes. It tells me your rattle is not too pronounced; your lungs aren't completely hollow.” He sounded almost disappointed, as if he'd wanted her to be sicker than she was. He pulled back the covers and began prodding her legs; she decided to let him.

“Not much swelling here,” he said, again with that jarring note of disappointment. “Perhaps no swelling at all. Tell me—how painful are your joints?”

“My joints?” she asked, the repetition this time signifying not passivity but confusion. As far as she could recollect, a joint was a cut of meat.

“Here”—he clasped her knee—“where your bones join together. The disease can settle in them as well.”

“Oh. Not bad.” She paused as he rustled with the bedclothes, covering her up again.

He twitched at the quilt, trying to make it lie perfectly straight. “And where did you come from? Have you remembered anything? You don't speak with a native accent.”

“Nor do you, I think.”

“I was born in France.”

“I believe I was born somewhere else as well,” Ophelia said meditatively. “But I cannot say exactly where.”

“I know you have a brother,” said Edouard.

Her face did not move; it was as if carved from marble. “I do?”

“And he is a painter. You came here to look for him.” Her expression still did not change, and with a guilty sense of relief Edouard nodded to Precious Flower, who placed a chair behind him. He sat and pulled out a diagram. “Perhaps you will remember as your health improves . . . This,” he said, changing subject rapidly, “is what a diseased lung looks like.”

It was horrible, yellow-pink tissue spotted with grayish holes, looking like spoiled cheese. How disgusting to think that was how she looked inside.

“And this”—he produced another drawing—“is what is making you sick.”

“This” looked like a bubble, somewhat elongated and slightly fuzzy around the edges, utterly empty inside. Involuntarily she clutched at her chest.

“Oh, it is very tiny,” he hastened to assure her. “So small that you can't see it without a special instrument known as a microscope. Doctors did not discover these little organisms—they are called bacilli—until three years ago. The discovery completely changed the way we think of this disease. Bacilli are
alive
, you know, and we must kill them to make you better.”

Edouard pointed from one artist's drawing to another. He was finding it much easier to speak now that he had a clear role to play in the conversation. It occurred to him that the role even required a certain tolerance from those with whom he spoke; doctors were often abrupt, absorbed in their scientific calculations. So: “Each bacillus creates a tubercle in the flesh—these little holes here and here. That is why advanced medical men now call your disease
tuberculosis
.”

She appeared never to have heard those words before; to Edouard, it was just as well, for he derived some comfort from saying them aloud. He elaborated at length, pulling out more drawings, diagrams, and cross-sectional illustrations. The girl's eyes glazed over, and she began to cough uncontrollably—or not so uncontrollably, he thought, for wasn't it his clearest mission to cure that cough? He passed her one of the black-bordered handkerchiefs and continued talking.

Precious Flower, standing behind him in her dark gray uniform, thought that the tubercles looked like grains of rice; only of course they were not grains of anything, but hollow spaces where nothing but these bacilli could
exist. Tiny spaces, like the crib in Chinatown where she had lived like a bacillus herself, singsonging out to men as they passed: “You want nice China girl? Two bits lookee, four bits feelee, eight bits fuckee . . .” Until Edouard Versailles had bought her, as he had bought two of her singsong sisters, and commenced the process of bringing them back to apparent good health (Ancient Jade and Life's Importance were still clapped, but they managed to hide the periodic outbreaks) and morals. The process which, she thought as she passed him a pad of paper and a pen, had rendered the girls themselves completely invisible at last.

“I have developed a theory,” Edouard said, writing the name
Ophelia
at the top of a page and feeling deliciously like a real doctor as he did so, “a theory that I believe will cure you completely, as it has done for me. It is based on the principle of flushing . . .”

“Flushing?” The patient looked toward the little room to her right.

“Yes, flushing out these tiny, evil creatures.” He motioned to Precious Flower, who poured a glass of fizzing water from the pitcher and handed it to him. He, in turn, gave it to the girl in the bed. “They cannot live in the light, and once we flush them from the body's cavities, they themselves die. This flushing must be accomplished on both physical and mental levels, for a weakened mind weakens the body and allows the bacilli to prey. We accomplish the first by means of copious liquids and purges, the second by creating an environment of calm. And finally, there is a galvanic device I have been developing—”

“Calm?” she said, staring at the hissing glass. She did not care for the bubbles now. “Evil?”

“Yes,” he said firmly. “Only someone at peace with himself can truly come free of this disease. A calm mind lulls the bacilli into stasis so they may be the more easily flushed. Now drink, and then I shall have the nurse bring up my machine.”

He watched, with mounting excitement, while she drank.

Why, Coloradoans are the most disappointed people I ever saw. Two-thirds of them came here to die, and they
can't do it.
This wonderful air brings them back from the verge of the tomb, and they are naturally exceedingly disappointed
.

P. T. B
ARNUM
,
L
ECTURE

Mæka was like a dream, Viggo thought, a dream of a world that could not possibly exist—but that could not be a dream, really, because who would ever imagine those vast plains of sand with their thick, prickly plants; the even stranger salt flats, where nothing grew and salt lay crusted like ice over swampy earth—the
mountains
? No one who had not already seen such places could believe they existed, wild places more fantastic than anything in a fairy tale or martyr's history.

Snow and other weather permitting, he spent the winter on the move, posting handbills, painting corpses, following the trail of canvas that he was sure would one day lead him to Famke. He was very aware of the money in his right boot, which had now callused his foot not quite to the point of insensitivity; with every step he took, that money reminded him of why he took steps at all. When the trail faded away, he patiently returned to the last place of certainty and began again, asking about paintings and about “Albert Castle, the painter,” in town after town until he was as well known as the artist himself.

It wasn't till Mirage, Colorado, that Viggo's method slipped, and he asked merely for “Mr. Castle, the painter.” The
Luder
to whom he'd addressed that question answered it with another: “Do you mean Albert or Dante?”

Thus Viggo, who had begun to identify himself as the model's brother for the sake of her reputation, learned that the painter had a brother as well.
When he asked for a description of Mr. Dante Castle, the picture that his interlocutor painted with words excited him so much that he himself nearly became a candidate for the services of a chthonic artist. He spent a febrile, heart-thumping hour drawing rapid conclusions, and he realized what the fancy girls had not: Dante Castle was a fiction; Dante Castle was Famke; Dante was following Albert; and if Viggo followed Dante, he would find Famke. He hoped to do it before Albert did.

So, methodically, Viggo rode back to Denver and retraced his steps. This time through, he discovered that the peculiarities of the paintings he'd seen along the way—the penumbras around certain figures, the elevation of some girls on the plane of the canvas, the occasional visibly clumsy thick layers of paint—were the work of a revisionist, of the “brother” who had followed Albert around, not the original artist's design. This made the paintings all the more precious to Viggo, and he recognized a fierce desire to own one of them, or all—these tableaux that not only represented Famke's face and figure but also showed the actual work of her hands. He felt a kinship with the women in the paintings; they had been cut and reassembled and permanently marked by the object of his quest and dreams.

On his second trip to Leadville, he was able to fulfill his longing in a small way. Whereas his first visit had yielded him nothing, this time some more persistent digging led him to a
Twilight of the Muses
—unaltered—by Albert Castle, in a house inhabited by a very congenial young lady who had once worked for someone called Dixie Holler.

“Dante?” she said meditatively, her breath hot and intimate in Viggo's ear. “Yes, he came by, the night the Dynamite Gang blew Mother Holler's house away. Vanished that very same night . . . So far as I'm aware he never came back, neither, though Bertie did—just a day or two after the explosion. Said he wanted to sketch the . . . the destruction of the imperfect . . . And he wanted to see what Mother Holler would erect in its place . . .”

Viggo twitched. Without his notice, her soft little hand had crept into his trousers. Politely but firmly, he removed it now.

“Well, he painted the girls here, at least.” Sweet Myrt sat back and blew at her yellow frizz, the very picture of irritated boredom. “Old Dixie took her business to San Antonio, and I ended up at Mother Askling's, where it's harder than ever to earn a dollar.” She stood up but was detained by a last question from Viggo.

“Where is Mr. Albert Castle now?” He thought that this information might be of some use, at least.

Prodded by a reproving stare from her current manager, Myrt stayed long enough to say, “I've no notion,” and then flounced over to to perch on the arm of a real customer's chair. “Bill!” She exploded a kiss in his ear.

Viggo paid for his whiskey and left. Out in the cold of early evening, he trudged toward the row of raw-lumbered flophouses that had sprung up in the fire's wake. New snow balled up under his boot heels, so he had to stop periodically to scrape them.

During one of these pauses, as he scrubbed his sole against the base of a gas lamp, a gleam in a shop window caught Viggo's eye. In this town of so much silver, in a region of gold and turquoise and other fine things, there was something in the curve of this object that drew him closer. Pressing his nose against the pane, he saw a delicate silver box with three—three—
Gud
, three beautiful naked ladies entwined.

Accustomed as he was now to spending time with whores, there was something in that particular nakedness that excited him. He thought perhaps it was because of his newly awakened sense of artistry, learned through contemplating the work of Albert Castle and Famke. Yes, with its graceful lines and luminous surface, that box was an object of real art.

But just as suddenly as he'd noticed the box, he forgot all about it. Because in the rank just behind, catching a reflected glow from the many objects of silver, brass, and glazed porcelain, was a scrap that spoke to him even more intimately, even more importantly. It was about the size of his hand, brightly colored—just a flat bit of canvas pinned to a board. It featured a pair of serpentine white arms and a few locks of burnished red hair.

That these elements were mere amputations, ancillary to the scrap's main figure—a curvaceous blonde wearing only a helmet and a cloud about her hips—meant nothing to Viggo. He was familiar enough now with the work of A. C. to recognize one of his hallmarks, the figure of Famke he added whenever a composition required a ninth Muse or a background figure to give the beholder an impression of plenty. He even recognized the composition itself, a
Hero's Repose
; for however Albert's Valkyries might vary in the face, their bodies always assumed the same attitudes.

This was clearly a wisp of what Viggo sought, and it was tattered
enough to be within his grasp right now. He knocked on the door till the shopkeeper came to open it.

“Just a bit of the wreckage,” the man explained, swiping at a grease-smeared mouth with his sleeve. Viggo had interrupted him at dinner. “Flotsam. Of interest for its connection to the fire, most likely, though the colors were fresh beneath the soot. I can show you something much bigger . . .”

“This one,” Viggo said firmly, reaching for his left boot.

Three dollars later, the piece was his. To the shopman's amusement, Viggo untacked it from the board, rolled it carefully, and wrapped it in a clean handkerchief. It might be just a pair of arms and a long lock of hair, but Viggo thought them a very good likeness.

Stethoscope, microscope, bacilli, tubercles. And now a new word—or rather, a word she had long known but only now was beginning to understand.