Servant of the Bones

  She was powerfully drawn to these attributes, and there came again that rush of memory, of ancient people talking and saying things of the utmost importance, and someone saying, "If one has to do it, where could we find a man more beautiful! One who more resembles the god?"

  The car moved faster and faster through empty streets. Other engines were quiet, and the pavements of New York were lined with thin, spindly little trees that fluttered with little leaves, almost like offerings before their lordly buildings. Stone and iron were the makings of this place. How fragile the leaves looked when the wind caught them--forlorn, tiny, and colorless.

  We took on greater speed. We had come to a wide road, and I could smell more strongly the stench of the river. The sweet smell of water was barely detectable, but it made me powerfully thirsty. I'd passed over this river with Gregory but had not known thirst then. I knew it now. Thirst meant the body was really strong.

  "Whoever you are," she said, "I'll tell you this. If we make it to that plane, and I think we're going to, you'll never want for anything again in your life."

  "Explain about the necklace," I said gently.

  "Gregory has a past, a big secret past, a past I knew nothing about and Esther stumbled on it when she bought the necklace. She bought the necklace from a Hasidic Jew who looked exactly like Gregory. And the man told her he was actually Gregory's twin."

  "Yes, Nathan, of course," I said, "among the diamond merchants, a Hasid, of course."

  "Nathan! You know this man?"

  "Well, I don't know him, but I know the grandfather, the Rebbe, because Gregory went to him to find out what the words meant, the words Esther had said."

  "What Rebbe!"

  "His grandfather, Gregory's grandfather. The Rebbe's name is Avram, but they have some title for him. Look, you said she stumbled on his past, that he had this big family in Brooklyn."

  "It's a big family?" she asked.

  "Yes, very big, a whole Court of Hasidim, a clan, a tribe. You don't know anything of this at all."

  "Ah," she sat back. "Well, I knew it was a family. I understood that from their quarrels. But I didn't know much else about it. He and Esther quarreled. She had found out about this family. It wasn't just the brother Nathan who sold her the necklace. My God, there was this whole secret. Could he have killed her because she knew about his brother? His family?"

  "One problem with it," I said.

  "Which is what?"

  "Why would Gregory want to keep his past secret? When I was there with him and the Rebbe, his grandfather, it was the Rebbe who begged for secrecy. Now surely the Hasidim didn't kill Esther. That's too stupid to consider."

  She was overwhelmed.

  The car had crossed the river and was plunging down into the hellish place of multistoried brick buildings, full of the cheap and mournful light.

  She pondered, shook her head.

  "Look, why were you with Gregory and this Rebbe?"

  "Gregory went to him to find out the meaning of the words Esther spoke. The Rebbe knew. The Rebbe had the bones. Gregory has the bones now. I am called the Servant of the Bones. The Rebbe sold the bones to Gregory on the promise that he would never speak to his brother Nathan again, or come near the court, or expose them as connected to Gregory's childhood or his church."

  "Good God!" she said. She was scrutinizing me harshly.

  "Look, the Rebbe never called me to come forth. The Rebbe wanted no part of me. But he had had custody of the bones all his life from his father, from years in Poland at the end of the last century. I gathered this from listening to them. I had been asleep in the bones!"

  She was speechless. "You obviously believe what you're saying," she said. "You believe it."

  "You talk," I said, "about Esther and Nathan--"

  "Esther came home and had this fight with Gregory, screaming at him that if he had kindred across the bridge he should acknowledge them, that the love of his brother was a real thing. I heard this. I didn't pay any attention. She came in and talked to me about it. I said if they were Hasidim they'd recited Kaddish for him long ago. I was so sick. I was drugged. Gregory was furious with her. But they had their fights, you know. But he...he has something to do with her dying, I know it! That necklace. She would never have worn the necklace in midday."

  "Why?"

  "Very simple reason. Esther was brought up in the best schools, and made her debut as a girl. Diamonds are for after six o'clock. Esther would have never worn a diamond necklace on Fifth Avenue at high noon. It wouldn't have been proper. But why did he hurt her? Why? Could it have been over this family? No, I don't understand it. And he weaves in the diamonds, why? Why bring up the necklace in the middle of all this!"

  "Keep telling me these things. I'm seeing the pattern. Ships, planes, a past that is a secret as much for Gregory as for the innocent Hasidim. I see something...but it's not clear." She stared at me.

  "Talk," I said. "You talk. You trust in me. You know I'm your guardian, I'm for your good. I love you and I love your daughter because you're good and you're just and people have done cruelty to you. I don't like cruelty. It makes me edgy and wanting to hurt..."

  This stunned her. But she believed it. Then she tried to speak and couldn't. Her mind was flooded, and she began to tremble. I touched her face with comforting hands. I hoped they were warm and sweet to her.

  "Let me alone now," she begged kindly. But she put her hand on my arm, patting me, comforting me, and she let her body lean on my shoulder. She made a fist of her right hand.

  She curled up against me, and crossed her legs so that I could see her naked knee against mine, firm and fair beneath her hem. She gave a low moan and a terrible outcry of grief.

  The car was slowing to a crawl.

  We had come to a strange sprawling field full of evil fumes and planes, yes, planes. Planes now explained themselves to me in all their shuddering, keening glory, giant metal birds on tiny preposterous wheels, with wings laden with oil enough to bum the entire world in its fire. Planes flew. Planes crept. Planes lay about empty with gaping doors and ugly stairways leading into the night. Planes slept.

  "Come on," she said. She clenched my hand. "Whatever you are, you and I are together in this. I believe you."

  "Well you should," I whispered.

  But I was dazed.

  As we got out of the car, I knew only my thoughts, following her, hearing voices, paying no attention, looking up at the stars. The air was so full of smoke, it was like the smoke in war when everything is burning.

  Amid deafening noise we approached the plane. She gave orders but I couldn't hear her words; the wind just snatched them up. The stairs spilled down in one firm piece like the Ladder to Heaven, only it was merely the metal ladder into this plane.

  Suddenly, as we began to climb together, she closed her eyes and stopped. She groped, sightless, for my neck with her hands and held me tight, as if feeling for the arteries in my neck. She was sick and in pain.

  "I have you," I whispered.

  Ritchie, the driver, waited behind me, eager to help.

  She caught her breath.

  She rushed up the steps.

  I had to hurry to catch up with her.

  We entered a low doorway together, into a sanctum of intolerable sound. A young woman with brave, cold eyes said:

  "Mrs. Belkin, your husband wants you to come home."

  "No, we're going to my home now," she said.

  Two uniformed men stepped out of the front of the plane. I glimpsed a tiny chamber there, in the plane's nose, full of buttons and lights.

  The cold pale-eyed woman led me towards the back of the plane, but I took my time, listening so that I could be there if needed.

  "Do what I tell you," Rachel said. I heard the rapid capitulation of the men. "Get off the ground as soon as possible."

  The pale woman had left me standing beneath the roof and doubled back to stop Rachel. Ritchie, the loyal driver, hovered over Rachel.

  "Leave the magazines and
the papers there!" Rachel said. "What do you think, she'll come back to life if I read about her? Get off the ground as fast as you can!"

  There was a little chorus of weakening rebellion--men, women, even the elderly gray-haired Ritchie.

  "You just come with me, that's all!" she said, and once again the silence fell around her as if she were the Queen.

  She took my hand, and I was led by her into a small chamber padded in glistening leather. Everything here was smooth. The leather was tender, and the place glowed with refinements: thick glass goblets on a small table, hassocks for our feet, deep chairs that would hold us as dearly as couches.

  The voices died away, or sank low and conspiratorial, behind curtains.

  The little windows were the only ugliness, so thick and scratched and dirty that they revealed nothing of the night outside. The noise was the night. The stars weren't visible.

  She told me to sit down.

  I obeyed, sinking into an awkward couch of odoriferous dyed leather that caught me up as if it wanted to render me helpless and awkward, as a father might pick up his son by the ankle into the air.

  We faced each other now in these scooped and oddly comfortable couches. I became used to it, the seeming indignity. I grasped that for the severity of the materials, this was a form of opulence. We were lounging here, like potentates. Brilliantly colored magazines lay on the table before us, one neatly overlapping the other. Folded newspapers that had been arranged in a carefully designed circle. Stale air blew upon us as if it were some sort of deliberate blessing.

  "You really have never seen a plane before, have you?" she asked.

  "No," I said. "I don't need them. This is all so very luxurious," I said. "I can't sit up straight if I wanted to."

  The woman with the pale cold eyes had come, and she was reaching down beside me for tethers, a strap with a buckle. I was fascinated by her skin and her hands. All of these people were so very nearly perfect. How?

  "Safety belt," said Rachel. She snapped the buckle of her own, and now she did a thing which seduced me.

  She kicked off her shoes, her beautiful ornate shoes with their high thin heels. She pushed at them, one foot at the other, till they fell loose, and on her narrow white feet I saw the imprint of the straps that had covered her feet, and I wanted to touch them. I wanted to kiss them.

  Was this perhaps one of the most well-developed bodies I'd ever had?

  The cold woman looked at me uncomfortably and shifted, and then only reluctantly went away. Rachel ignored all this.

  I couldn't take my eyes off her, vivid and somber in the dim light of this sanctuary, this plane, and I desired her. I wanted to touch the inner flesh of her thighs, and see whether the fleece-covered flower there was as well preserved as everything else.

  This was disconcerting and shameful. Another realization came to me. Diseased things can be so beautiful. Perhaps a flame is a diseased thing, if you think about it, a flame dancing on its wick, eating up the wax beneath it, the way this disease was eating up her body from around her soul. She made a dazzling heat in her fever and the keenness of her mind.

  "And so we fly in this," I said, "we go up, and we travel faster than we can on the ground, like a javelin hurled through space, only we have the means of directing ourselves."

  "Yes," she said. "It's going to take us to the southern tip of this country in less than two hours," she said. "We'll be in my home, my little home which all these years has been mine alone, and there I'll die. And I know it."

  "You want to?"

  "Yes," she said. "My head's clearing even now. I can feel pain. I can feel his poison clearing from my system. Yes, I want to know it. I want to be a witness to what happens to me."

  I wanted to say that I didn't think death was like that for most human beings, but I didn't want to say anything I wasn't sure of, and certainly nothing to bring her more pain.

  She gestured to the woman, who must have been lingering somewhere behind me. The plane had begun to roll, presumably on its tiny wheels. It didn't roll easily.

  "Something to drink," Rachel said. "What would you like?" And suddenly she smiled. She wanted to make a joke. "What do ghosts like to drink?"

  I said, "Water. I'm so relieved that you asked me. I'm parched with thirst. This body is dense and delicately put together. I think it's growing true parts!"

  She laughed out loud. "I wonder what parts those could be!" she said.

  This water had come. Lots of it. Glorious water.

  The clear bottle was nestled in a huge bucket of ice, and the ice was beautiful. Ripping my eyes off the water itself, I stared at the ice. Of everything I had seen in this modern age, nothing, simply nothing, compared to the simple beauty of this ice, glittering and sparkling around this strangely dull container of water.

  The young woman who had just set down this bucket of wondrous ice now drew the bottle of water out of it, so that the ice fell and crunched and made a gorgeous twinkling in the light. I could see that the bottle was made of something soft, not glass at all; it didn't have the shimmer or the strength of glass; it was plastic. You could squash the bottle flat when it was empty. It was the lightest container for this water, like a bladder filled with milk strapped to a donkey, the thinnest, finest bladder you could find.

  The woman poured the water into two glass goblets. Ritchie appeared. He bent down and whispered something in Rachel's ear. It had to do with Gregory and his rage.

  "We're on schedule," he said. He pointed to the magazines, "There's something--"

  "Leave all that alone, I don't care, I've read it all, what does it matter? It comforts me that her picture is on every magazine cover. Why not?"

  He tried to protest but she told him firmly to go. The plane was taking off. Someone called him. He had to buckle up.

  I drank the water, greedily, the way you've seen me drink. She was amused. The plane was leaving the ground.

  "Drink it all," she said, "there's plenty of it."

  I took her at her word and drained the entire plastic bottle. My body absorbed all of this and was still thirsty, its strongest indicator of growing strength.

  So what was Gregory doing? Fuming over the bones? Didn't matter! Or did it?

  It suddenly occurred to me that almost every delicate maneuver I had ever performed had been under the direction of a magician. Even taking a woman, I'd done with their grudging leave. I could rise, I could kill, then dissolve. Yes.

  That is not delicate, but the direct arousal of passion I felt for this woman--the strengthening that came to me from this water--this was new.

  It struck me with total clarity that I had to find out just how strong I was on my own, and I hadn't taken any serious steps to do so. I felt as strong in the presence of this woman's carnal attraction to me as I had in Gregory's fascination.

  As I put the bottle down, I realized I had let drops of water fall on the papers and magazines. I looked at them.

  Then I saw what had so concerned the others about these magazines. The pictures on them were of Esther at the worst moment. There were pictures of Esther almost dead!

  Yes, there on the cover of one newsmagazine was the picture of Esther on her stretcher, and the crowds around her.

  Someone said we were on course for Miami and cleared for an immediate landing when we got there.

  "Miami." The sound made me laugh. "Miami." It was like a joke word you say to little children to make them laugh. "Miami."

  The plane was bouncing along. But the pale-eyed girl came with another bottle of water. It was cold. It didn't need the ice. I took it and drank it in easy patient swallows.

  I sat back, filling with the water. Oh, this was the most divine moment, a moment almost on a par with kissing Rachel, to feel this water move down my throat and through the coils inside of me made by will and by magic. I breathed deep.

  I opened my eyes, and saw that Rachel was watching me. The girl was gone. The glasses were gone. The only water that remained was the bottle I clutched in
my hands.

  A great pressure bore down on me, fondling me, pushing me against the leather, and teasing me almost with a sweet strength that was mysterious.

  The plane was rising fast into the sky, very fast. The pressure increased and my head suddenly ached, but this I sent away from me. I looked at her. She sat still as if praying, as if this were a ceremonial moment, and she did not speak or move until the plane had found some comfortable height and ceased to rise.

  I knew the moment by the way she relaxed, and by the sounds of the engines. I didn't much like this plane. Yet the experience was thrilling.

  You're alive, Azriel, you are alive! I must have laughed. Or maybe I wept. I needed more water. No, I would have liked to have more water. I needed nothing.

  But I had to know what Gregory was doing with my bones. Was he trying at this very moment to call me back? He had to be doing something, though I felt no reverberations. I wanted to know. And I also wanted to know if, strong as this body was, I could at will dissolve it and recall it. I wanted badly to know.

  I ran my tongue on my lips, which were cold from the water. I realized that my attraction to this woman, this delicate pale creature, had brought my anger and my confusion to the limit. I had to stop wondering about this and that and simply declare myself master. That's what I had to do. I wanted her. It was all connected in a human way--the carnal desire for her, and the desire to strive against Gregory and defy him, prove to myself he did not control me merely because the bones were now in his possession.

  "You're frightened," Rachel said. "Don't be frightened of the plane. The plane is routine." Then a mischievous smile came on her again, and she said, "Of course it could explode at any minute, but, well, so far, it never has." She gave an easy bitter laugh.

  "Listen, you have an expression in English, kill two birds with one stone?" I said. "I'm going to do it. I'm going to leave you now, and come back. That will prove to you that I'm a spirit and you'll stop worrying that you're consorting in desperation with a madman, and also I'll find out what Gregory is up to. Because he does have those bones, and he is a strange, strange man."

  "You're going to disappear from here? Inside this plane?"