Three Moments of an Explosion (46 page)

One night, while we were among Bradley’s guests (Bradley was a braggart but for his club we indulged him), attention turned to me.

“But what was it happened?” Leadwith kept saying. He was a good fellow, without malice, but he was rather in his cups. “How’d you end up here in the middle of term in such a fearful rush? You were at Durham, weren’t you?” He chortled. “Was it a girl? Why
Glasgow
?”

I responded vaguely and jocularly, but he wouldn’t let it lie. “No, really, do tell, Gerald,” he said. He was staring. I avoided looking at anyone in particular. “What was it brought you up here?”

“Come now, Charles,” someone said, but the chaps were interested too, and I think pleased that someone was gauche enough to ask such questions. The knave at the feast is a blessed exoneration for better-behaved diners.

William spoke.

“Charles,” he said. “You’re being a bore. Gerald doesn’t want to talk about this. It’s a poor show that you won’t let it go.”

In the silence that followed, William was the only person who did not seem embarrassed. “You would say that,” someone said feebly, “gallivanting off with some secret fancy all the time.” But William said, “And is it not my right to gallivant exactly as much as I wish?”

He smiled. A few people laughed. Conversation moved on. Leadwith came and found me and muttered, “I’m sorry, old man, I’m an ass.” Of course I told him not to give it another thought.

William and I left together, our hands jammed in our pockets, huddled against the cold. We didn’t speak much. He did not even say anything along the lines of “Old Leadwith can put his foot in it.” When we reached my rooms, we paused under a streetlamp and he met my eyes. After a moment he clapped me on the shoulder and walked off in the fog.

A revolting rancidity was setting in to the remains, preservative or no.
Dermestes maculatus
would have turned up their beetle noses. Acid would have damaged the bone. In his newfound workroom, with the small window painted over and the door padlocked, William proceeded by the only methods available to him.

He cut for hours, excising gray flesh and piling offcuts in a covered pail. He dipped a handkerchief in dilute cologne and fastened it around his face. Larger bones he separated by knife; he did not try to do so with the smaller, the digits, the fiddly metatarsals.

How many times he wished for a larger stove! He boiled as large a tub of water as he could, and into it he placed the head. The room grew horribly hot. No matter how scientific and dispassionate one’s mind-set, to look into a bubbling stockpot and see the flash of eyes looking up when tumbling water lets them, eyes one ought, one realizes, to have removed against such glances, to be treated to a sneer as the heat pulls back what remains of lips, is desperate.

The liquid thickened. In an action revoltingly like cooking, William scooped out the lifting flesh with a slotted spoon. He could not stop himself from retching.

He smoked and studied as well as he could while he waited, which was not well. He added water to the stove. It was much later, at the other end of the night, by the time he at last fished in the pot with tongs. What he brought out made him gasp and fumble. It fell back into the water, splashing him with scalding drops and human particulate as he clapped a trembling hand to his mouth.

William tried again. The head steamed. The distended eggy sacs the eyes had become stared in awful manner. He took them out. He could see bone through the parting flesh.

William peeled off the remains of the face. He cleaned the skull down. The brain would necessitate creative cerebrectomy, Egyptian style, perhaps, through the nose. For now he held out his prize and met its empty gaze.

It was marked by lines in the same dark red he remembered from within the arm. Stained not by lampblack but by the endless passage of blood.

On one side of the frontal bone was a tall ship. It bore unknown cargo on an intricate sea. Over the left eye was a knot of lines that might have been a submerged beast following that vessel. The maxila: a jungle. Thickets of ivy in Beaux-Arts curves, boughs teeming with squirrels, birds of paradise courting in the greenery.

The sphenoid swarmed with animals. On the zygoma were cogs of some shaded machine. On the temporal bone were clouds. There were weapons on the parietal; on the mandible, monkeys and fruit. Surrounding the nasal cavity were marks like those made by a calligrapher breaking in a new pen.

The display had been obscured by blood and skin. Life had been necessary to finish this piece—years of blood flow to color the lines, years of growth to pull the skeleton into the right configuration. How had the design looked when the man was six years old? When he was ten, and seventeen?

William ran his fingers over the voyaging ship. He could feel the lines scratched in the still-cooling bone.

Of course I asked more than once about the body that had gone missing immediately before my arrival. Such curiosity on my part was perfectly understandable. What had it looked like? I asked. Where had it been cut? Joking aside, what
did
people think might have happened?

I asked those whose specimen it had been. “I’m afraid I have not even the idlest speculation,” said Sanders. “I don’t even
like
anatomy,” he said, as if that were relevant. Adenborough and Parish offered no more insight.

When I addressed my questions to William he was affable enough, but quiet, not at all forthcoming. I could not but note his guarded reaction. It left me more crestfallen than I wanted to admit. By then I was not indifferent to his preferences.

The cadavers we used were assiduously anonymised, but let us not be naïve: with sufficient money, time, and energy, William could have uncovered the identity of his. But he could not think how to protect himself if he pursued that route. He decided, with a gladness that bewildered him, that he would not seek to learn the name of the man on whose remains he worked.

My own cadaver was near William’s new station. During classes, I watched to see his oddly intent interventions. When we removed several inches from the tops of our specimens’ scalps, William went from station to station, examining each unmarked skull. His expression might have been one of disappointment or relief.

The little girl he had seen playing near his makeshift lab seemed excluded from the company of others of her age. She was often there in the shadow of a wall, always alone but for her rough toy, with its unraveling mouth and grubby dress. She would watch William come and go with the frank suspicion of the very young.

William steeled himself. He cooked down the meat of the feet and the hands so long that it crumbled when he pushed out the tiny bones. These he set carefully in place on a sheet he’d painted with a rough human outline. In its head-circle was the skull. William put down scaphoid, capitate, triquetral, and lunate, the phalanges of the fingers an undone puzzle.

Each piece, even the very smallest, was illustrated.

He kept water boiling, softened tough flesh, wiped clots of it from ulna, from vertebra after vertebra, ribs and hips. He laid down a disaggregated etched man, impatient to see what he’d found within the flesh.

William and I were visiting a small maritime museum. I performed repeated astonishment at that fact. “Not that I’m not delighted,” I kept saying, “but how did I end up here?”

“Mind games is how,” William said. “I bend all to my will.”

I asked him about his family. When he spoke of his father, that affable clerk, William conjured him for me with rueful dislike. For his mother he expressed affection, and a pity he tried to disguise. His sister was a teacher, his brother an importer of goods, and of them he had nothing to say.

I read aloud vainglorious descriptions of Glasgow’s shipyards. Not without sarcasm, I admired a little model clipper, some once-majestic such and such, et cetera.

I stopped at the sight of William staring at a cabinet of scrimshaw. Etchings of ship life, sea monsters, homilies on whale tooth and bone.

“That one’s American, I believe,” he said of a filigreed narwhal tusk. There was no note to say so.

“Are you an expert?” I managed at last to say. “At whose knee have you been investigating such things?”

“We all have interests,” he said. “I don’t doubt you have your own hidden depths, Gerald.”

I didn’t reply. When we left we deposited thank-you coins in the establishment’s donations box and wry remarks in its guest book.

“When you arrived,” William said after a long silence, “you must have felt like you’d stumbled into some secret society.”

“How so?”

“Oh, I don’t know. What with all of us already knowing each other. Sometimes one can’t help feeling one’s blundered into something as an outsider.”

“Well thank you very much,” I said. “I rather thought I wasn’t doing badly.”

“Oh hush,” he said. “I’m talking in general terms, as well you know. I suppose I’m saying that that feeling hits one more often than one might think. Walk into
any
room with
any
people already in it, that’ll do it. No matter how charmingly they try to bring you up to speed. Let alone coming up here as abruptly as you did.” He did not meet my eye. “About which of course I am terribly curious, though Leadwith remains an ass.”

He saw me open my mouth to speak, and he saw me close it again without a word. He cleared his throat. “I suspect that sense of
not being in on something
is more or less the human condition,” he said.

“I suppose,” I said.

“And on rare occasions,” he said, “there might actually be something to it. One stumbles into something to which one shouldn’t have been privy. I wonder what sort of efforts those who
are
in the know might go to in response.”

He looked, in that moment, rather heartbreakingly boyish and forlorn. For a while neither of us spoke.

“Is everything all right?” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “I was going to ask the same of you.” I said nothing. “Pay me no mind.”

“If something’s been going on …” I said it hesitantly, as if fearful that he might tell me something
had,
and what it was.

“Pay me no mind.”

It was done. The bones were clean. They were laid down in a jigsaw man.

Winter was waning. William sluiced his drains with acid.

He had taken a long way to his room that day, unable to shake the feeling that he was being followed. Now he dried the skeleton, brushed the bones gently. He rotated the humerus, tracing the voyage of some Sindbad-like figure through various lands. He wanted to make it glow.

He hesitated, scribbled something in a notebook and tore out the page, then opened his door and looked at the girl playing with her doll. She stood guardedly under his gaze. “Hullo,” he said. “Would you like to earn a shilling?”

The girl answered at last, in so strong a local accent that William could not but laugh. He could understand barely a word.

“You know Mr. Murray?” They knew him there. “Give him this. He’ll give you beeswax. Bring it here and I’ll give you the shilling.”

The child took the paper and ran off in the right direction. For all he knew, that was the last he would ever see of her. William sat on his step, closed the door and leaned back on it, and smoked in the sunlight.

When the girl did return holding a big jar, he cheered her and raised his hands. She rewarded him with his beeswax and a remarkable smile.

She said something. When he understood that she was asking him “whit he had in there,” he said, “I can’t tell you,” and she turned and walked away instantly, without a word, without wheedling. Her lack of surprise that her hopes would be dashed horrified him. He called her back.

William’s were now the pleasures of polishing. One by one he made the etched bones shine. The skull gleamed. Scapula, sternum, tib and fib. On the left patella, a rising sun; on the right a crescent moon with a wolf face. The dead man had knelt on pagan signs.

“I don’t mind telling you,” William said to me later, “it made me weep to see it all, like that, at last.”
This is something to be parsed,
he thought as he tracked the illustrations, sought a route, a journey on the ship he had seen. Arm leg leg arm head, around the rib cage, perhaps? A hero’s journey?

“Do you know what this is?” William said.

The girl stared at the marked nugget he held. Is it, she ventured, a biscuit? “It’s called a sacrum,” he said. “I have one. And so will you when you’ve finished growing. But d’you see?” Flags in a breeze, blowing left to right across the bone. Mountains, a forest. The child regarded it gravely. Did he draw that? No, he told her. He told her that something or someone else had done so.

He let her run her fingers along the patterns. It was no longer only he who had seen this thing and he was glad. He put it in her memory. He told her that this had been underneath a man’s skin.

“You can imagine where that leaves a chap like me,” he said. “A freethinker, I might once have called myself, though that’s hardly anything like so dashing a label as once it was. It’s a rum thing for the likes of me, because who else could have put these here, eh?” His voice went low. “God is a scrimshander.”

The girl did not look at him nor he at her.

“Who
was
this man?” he said. “Did he know? Of how many is he one? I wonder about some brotherhood—sisterhood too, I’ve no reason to doubt. Some siblinghood of the lovingly carved?”

The house creaked. William glanced up. There was a new tenant above, whose motions made him wary, whose step he imagined he recognized.

“No one could say it isn’t done exquisitely,” he said. “But here’s the thing. Isn’t there something a little
haphazard
about it?”

If there was a story in the design, William could not decode it. He could make no narrative sense of the men and monkeys, women and nightjars, the stars, monsters furred and feathered, machines, clocks, the hunt conducted with flintlocks, the giraffe pasha on a stone throne, cities with onion domes above clouds, knots like those on Celtic graves. William made the girl laugh at the beasts on the mandible.