Read Good Bones and Simple Murders Online
Authors: Margaret Atwood
Tags: #Literary, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Fiction
Good Bones and Simple Murders (10 page)
Let me propose myself as typical. I walk upright on two legs, and have in addition two arms, with ten appendages, that is to say, five at the end of each. On the top of my head, but not on the front, there is an odd growth, like a species of seaweed. Some think this is a kind of fur, others consider it modified feathers, evolved perhaps from scales like those of lizards. It serves no functional purpose and is probably decorative.
My eyes are situated in my head, which also possesses two small holes for the entrance and exit of air, the invisible fluid we swim in, and one larger hole, equipped with bony protuberances called teeth, by means of which I destroy and assimilate certain parts of my surroundings and change them into my self. This is called eating. The things I eat include roots, berries, nuts, fruits, leaves, and the muscle tissues of various animals and fish. Sometimes I eat their brains and glands as well. I do not as a rule eat insects, grubs, eyeballs, or the snouts of pigs, though these are eaten with relish in other countries.
Some of my people have a pointed but boneless external appendage, in the front, below the navel or midpoint. Others do not. Debate about whether the possession of such a thing is an advantage or a disadvantage is still going on. If this item is lacking, and in its place there is a pocket or inner cavern in which fresh members of our community are grown, it is considered impolite to mention it openly to strangers. I tell you this because it is the breach of etiquette most commonly made by tourists.
In some of our more private gatherings, the absence of cavern or prong is politely overlooked, like club feet or blindness. But sometimes a prong and a cavern will collaborate in a dance, or illusion, using mirrors and water, which is always absorbing for the performers but frequently grotesque for the observers. I notice that you have similar customs.
Whole conventions and a great deal of time have recently been devoted to discussions of this state of affairs. The prong people tell the cavern people that the latter are not people at all and are in reality more
akin to dogs or potatoes, and the cavern people abuse the prong people for their obsession with images of poking, thrusting, probing, and stabbing. Any long object with a hole at the end, out of which various projectiles can be shot, delights them.
I myself—I am a cavern person—find it a relief not to have to worry about climbing over barbed wire fences or getting caught in zippers.
But that is enough about our bodily form.
As for the country itself, let me begin with the sunsets, which are long and red, resonant, splendid and melancholy, symphonic you might almost say; as opposed to the short boring sunsets of other countries, no more interesting than a light switch. We pride ourselves on our sunsets. “Come and see the sunset,” we say to one another. This causes everyone to rush outdoors or over to the window.
Our country is large in extent, small in population, which accounts for our fear of empty spaces, and also our need for them. Much of it is covered in
water, which accounts for our interest in reflections, sudden vanishings, the dissolution of one thing into another. Much of it, however, is rock, which accounts for our belief in Fate.
In summer we lie about in the blazing sun, almost naked, covering our skins with fat and attempting to turn red. But when the sun is low in the sky and faint, even at noon, the water we are so fond of changes to something hard and white and cold and covers up the ground. Then we cocoon ourselves, become lethargic, and spend much of our time hiding in crevices. Our mouths shrink and we say little.
Before this happens, the leaves on many of our trees turn blood red or lurid yellow, much brighter and more exotic than the interminable green of jungles. We find this change beautiful. “Come and see the leaves,” we say, and jump into our moving vehicles and drive up and down past the forests of sanguinary trees, pressing our eyes to the glass.
We are a nation of metamorphs.
Anything red compels us.
Sometimes we lie still and do not move. If air is still going in and out of our breathing holes, this is called sleep. If not, it is called death. When a person has achieved death, a kind of picnic is held, with music, flowers, and food. The person so honored, if in one piece, and not, for instance, in shreds or falling apart, as they do if exploded or a long time drowned, is dressed in becoming clothes and lowered into a hole in the ground, or else burned up.
These customs are among the most difficult to explain to strangers. Some of our visitors, especially the young ones, have never heard of death and are bewildered. They think that death is simply one more of our illusions, our mirror tricks; they cannot understand why, with so much food and music, the people are sad.
But you will understand. You too must have death among you. I can see it in your eyes.
I can see it in your eyes. If it weren’t for this I would have stopped trying long ago, to communicate with you in this halfway language which is so difficult for both of us, which exhausts the throat and fills the mouth with sand; if it weren’t for this I would have gone away, gone back. It’s this knowledge of death, which we share, where we overlap. Death is our common ground. Together, on it, we can walk forward.
By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, take me to your leaders. Even I—unused to your ways though I am—would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of colored cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.
Instead I will say, take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.
These are worth it. These are what I have come for.
PAGE
1. The page waits, pretending to be blank. Is that its appeal, its blankness? What else is this smooth and white, this terrifyingly innocent? A snowfall, a glacier? It’s a desert, totally arid, without life. But people venture into such places. Why? To see how much they can endure, how much dry light?
2. I’ve said the page is white, and it is: white as wedding dresses, rare whales, seagulls, angels, ice and death. Some say that like sunlight it contains all colors; others, that it’s white because it’s hot, it will burn out your optic nerves; that those who stare at the page too long go blind.
3. The page itself has no dimensions and no directions. There’s no up or down except what you yourself mark, there’s no thickness and weight but those you put there, north and south do not exist unless you’re certain of them. The page is without vistas and without sounds, without centers or edges. Because of this you can become lost in it forever. Have you never seen the look of gratitude, the look of joy, on the faces of those who have managed to return from the page? Despite their faintness, their loss of blood, they fall on their knees, they push their hands into the earth, they clasp the bodies of those they love, or, in a pinch, any bodies they can get, with an urgency unknown to those who have never experienced the full horror of a journey into the page.
4. If you decide to enter the page, take a knife and some matches, and something that will float. Take something you can hold onto, and a prism to split the light and a talisman that works, which should be hung on a chain around your neck: that’s for getting back. It doesn’t matter what kind of shoes, but your hands should be bare. You should never go into the page with gloves on. Such decisions, needless to say, should not be made lightly.
There are those, of course, who enter
the page without deciding, without meaning to. Some of these have charmed lives and no difficulty, but most never make it out at all. For them the page appears as a well, a lovely pool in which they catch sight of a face, their own but better. These unfortunates do not jump: rather they fall, and the page closes over their heads without a sound, without a seam, and is immediately as whole and empty, as glassy, as enticing as before.
5. The question about the page is: what is beneath it? It seems to have only two dimensions, you can pick it up and turn it over and the back is the same as the front. Nothing, you say, disappointed.
But you were looking in the wrong place, you were looking
on the back
instead of
beneath. Beneath the page
is another story. Beneath the page is a story. Beneath the page is everything that has ever happened, most of which you would rather not hear about.
The page is not a pool but a skin, a skin is there to hold in and it can feel you touching it. Did you really think it would just lie there and do nothing?
Touch the page at your peril: it is you who are blank and innocent, not the page. Nevertheless
you want to know, nothing will stop you. You touch the page, it’s as if you’ve drawn a knife across it, the page has been hurt now, a sinuous wound opens, a thin incision. Darkness wells through.
ANGEL
I know what the angel of suicide looks like. I have seen her several times. She’s around.
She’s nothing like the pictures of angels you run across here and there, the ones in classical paintings, with their curls and beautiful eyelashes, or the ones on Christmas cards, all cute or white. Much is made, in these pictures, of the feet, which are always bare, I suppose to show that angels do not need shoes: walkers on nails and live coals all of them, aspirin hearts, dandelion-seed heads, air bodies.
Not so the angel of suicide, who is dense, heavy with antimatter, a dark star. But despite the differences, she does have something in common with those others. All angels are messengers, and so is she; which isn’t to say that all messages are good. The angels vary according to what they have to say: the angel of blindness, for instance, the angel of lung cancer, the angel of seizures, the destroying angel. The latter is also a mushroom.
(Snow angels, you’ve seen them: the cold blank shape of yourself, the outline you once filled. They too are messengers, they come from the future. This is what you will be, they say, perhaps what you are: no more than the way light falls across a given space.)
Angels come in two kinds: the others, and those who fell. The angel of suicide is one of those who fell, down through the atmosphere to the earth’s surface. Or did she jump? With her you have to ask.
Anyway, it was a long fall. From the friction of the air, her face melted off like the skin of a meteor. That is why the angel of suicide is so smooth. She has no face to speak of. She has the face of a gray egg. Noncommittal; though the shine of the fall still lingers.
They said, the pack of them, I will not serve. The angel of suicide is one of those: a rebellious waitress. Rebellion, that’s what she has to offer, to you, when you see her beckoning to you from outside the window, fifty stories up, or the edge of the bridge, or holding something out to you, some emblem of release, soft chemical, quick metal.
Wings, of course. You wouldn’t believe a thing she said if it weren’t for the wings.
HANDED
The third hand is the one stamped in bear’s grease and ocher, in charcoal and blood, on the walls of five-thousand-year-old caves; and in blue, on the doorposts, to ward off evil. It hangs in silver on a chain around the neck, signaling with its thumb; or, index finger extended, and with its golden wrist attached to an ebony stick, it strokes its way along the textural footpath, from Aleph to Omega. In churches it lurks in reliquaries, bony and bejeweled, or appears abruptly from fresco clouds, enormous and stern and significant, loud as a shout: Sin! Less elegant, banal even, and stenciled on a metal plate, it bosses us around:
WAY OUT
, it orders.
UP HERE. WAY DOWN
.
But these are merely pictures of it: roles, disguises, captured images, that in no way confine it. Do pictures of love confine love?
(The man and the woman walk down the street, hand in passionate hand; but whose hand is it really? It’s the third hand each one holds, not the beloved’s. It’s the third hand that joins them together, the third hand that keeps them apart.)
The third hand is neither left nor right, dexter nor sinister. Consider the man who is caught in the act, red-handed, as they say. He proclaims his innocence, and why not believe him?
What ax?
he says.
I didn’t know what I was doing, it wasn’t me, and look, my hands are clean!
No one notices the third hand creeping away painfully on its fingers, like a stepped-on crab, trailing raw blood from its severed wrist.
But that happens only to those who have disowned it, who have cut it off and nailed it to a board and shut it up in a wall safe or a strongbox. It’s light-fingered, the hand of a thief in the night; it will always get out, it will never hold still. It writes, and having written, moves. Moves on, dissolving, dissolving boundaries.
Vacant spaces belong to it, the vowel
o
, all blank pages, the number zero, the animals wolf and mole, the hour before birth and the minute after death, the loon, the owl, and all white flowers. The third hand opens doors, and closes them thoughtfully behind you. It is the other two that busy themselves with what goes on in the room.
