Good Bones Page 5

  My Life as a Bat

  1. REINCARNATION

  IN MY previous life I was a bat.

  If you find previous lives amusing or unlikely, you are not a serious person. Consider: a great many people believe in them, and if sanity is a general consensus about the content of reality, who are you to disagree?

  Consider also: previous lives have entered the world of commerce. Money can be made from them. You were Cleopatra, you were a Flemish Duke, you were a Druid priestess, and money changes hands. If the stock market exists, so must previous lives.

  In the previous-life market, there is not such a great demand for Peruvian ditch-diggers as there is for Cleopatra; or for Indian latrine-cleaners, or for 1952 housewives living in California split-levels. Similarly, not many of us choose to remember our lives as vultures, spiders or rodents, but some of us do. The fortunate few. Conventional wisdom has it that reincarnation as an animal is a punishment for past sins, but perhaps it is a reward instead. At least a resting place. An interlude of grace.

  Bats have a few things to put up with, but they do not inflict. When they kill, they kill without mercy, but without hate. They are immune from the curse of pity. They never gloat.

  2. NIGHTMARES

  I have recurring nightmares.

  In one of them, I am clinging to the ceiling of a summer cottage while a red-faced man in white shorts and a white V-necked T-shirt jumps up and down, hitting at me with a tennis racquet. There are cedar rafters up here, and sticky flypapers attached with tacks, dangling like toxic seaweeds. I look down at the man’s face, foreshortened and sweating, the eyes bulging and blue, the mouth emitting furious noise, rising up like a marine float, sinking again, rising as if on a swell of air.

  The air itself is muggy, the sun is sinking; there will be a thunderstorm. A woman is shrieking, “My hair! My hair!” and someone else is calling, “Anthea! Bring the stepladder!” All I want is to get out through the hole in the screen, but that will take some concentration and it’s hard in this din of voices, they interfere with my sonar. There is a smell of dirty bathmats – it’s his breath, the breath that comes out from every pore, the breath of the monster. I will be lucky to get out of this alive.

  In another nightmare I am winging my way – flittering, I suppose you’d call it – through the clean-washed demi-light before dawn. This is a desert. The yuccas are in bloom, and I have been gorging myself on their juices and pollen. I’m heading to my home, to my home cave, where it will be cool during the burnout of day and there will be the sound of water trickling through limestone, coating the rock with a glistening hush, with the moistness of new mushrooms, and the other bats will chirp and rustle and doze until night unfurls again and makes the hot sky tender for us.

  But when I reach the entrance to the cave, it is sealed over. It’s blocked in. Who can have done this?

  I vibrate my wings, sniffing blind as a dazzled moth over the hard surface. In a short time the sun will rise like a balloon on fire and I will be blasted with its glare, shrivelled to a few small bones.

  Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing?

  For some of us, the mythologies are different.

  3. VAMPIRE FILMS

  I became aware of the nature of my previous life gradually, not only through dreams but through scraps of memory, through hints, through odd moments of recognition.

  There was my preference for the subtleties of dawn and dusk, as opposed to the vulgar blaring hour of high noon. There was my déjà vu experience in the Carlsbad Caverns – surely I had been there before, long before, before they put in the pastel spotlights and the cute names for stalactites and the underground restaurant where you can combine claustrophobia and indigestion and then take the elevator to get back out.

  There was also my dislike for headfuls of human hair, so like nets or the tendrils of poisonous jellyfish: I feared entanglements. No real bat would ever suck the blood of necks. The neck is too near the hair. Even the vampire bat will target a hairless extremity: by choice a toe, resembling as it does the teat of a cow.

  Vampire films have always seemed ludicrous to me, for this reason but also for the idiocy of their bats – huge rubbery bats, with red Christmas-light eyes and fangs like a sabre-toothed tiger’s, flown in on strings, their puppet wings flapped sluggishly like those of an overweight and degenerate bird. I screamed at these filmic moments, but not with fear; rather with outraged laughter, at the insult to bats.

  O Dracula, unlikely hero! O flying leukemia, in your cloak like a living umbrella, a membrane of black leather which you unwind from within yourself and lift like a stripteaser’s fan as you bend with emaciated lust over the neck, flawless and bland, of whatever woman is longing for obliteration, here and now in her best negligee. Why was it given to you by whoever stole your soul to transform yourself into bat and wolf, and only those? Why not a vampire chipmunk, a duck, a gerbil? Why not a vampire turtle? Now that would be a plot.

  4. THE BAT AS DEADLY WEAPON

  During the Second World War they did experiments with bats. Thousands of bats were to be released over German cities, at the hour of noon. Each was to have a small incendiary device strapped onto it, with a timer. The bats would have headed for darkness, as is their habit. They would have crawled into holes in walls, or secreted themselves under the eaves of houses, relieved to have found safety. At a preordained moment they would have exploded, and the cities would have gone up in flames.

  That was the plan. Death by flaming bat. The bats too would have died, of course. Acceptable megadeaths.

  The cities went up in flames anyway, but not with the aid of bats. The atom bomb had been invented, and the fiery bat was no longer thought necessary.

  If the bats had been used after all, would there have been a war memorial to them? It isn’t likely.

  If you ask a human being what makes his flesh creep more, a bat or a bomb, he will say the bat. It is difficult to experience loathing for something merely metal, however ominous. We save these sensations for those with skin and flesh: a skin, a flesh, unlike our own.

  5. BEAUTY

  Perhaps it isn’t my life as a bat that was the interlude. Perhaps it is this life. Perhaps I have been sent into human form as if on a dangerous mission, to save and redeem my own folk. When I have gained a small success, or died in the attempt – for failure, in such a task and against such odds, is more likely – I will be born again, back into that other form, that other world where I truly belong.

  More and more, I think of this event with longing. The quickness of heartbeat, the vivid plunge into the nectars of crepuscular flowers, hovering in the infrared of night; the dank lazy half-sleep of daytime, with bodies rounded and soft as furred plums clustering around me, the mothers licking the tiny amazed faces of the newborn; the swift love of what will come next, the anticipations of the tongue and of the infurled, corrugated and scrolled nose, nose like a dead leaf, nose like a radiator grill, nose of a denizen of Pluto.

  And in the evening, the supersonic hymn of praise to our Creator, the Creator of bats, who appears to us in the form of a bat and who gave us all things: water and the liquid stone of caves, the woody refuge of attics, petals and fruit and juicy insects, and the beauty of slippery wings and sharp white canines and shining eyes.

  What do we pray for? We pray for food as all do, and for health and for the increase of our kind; and for deliverance from evil, which cannot be explained by us, which is hair-headed and walks in the night with a single white unseeing eye, and stinks of half-digested meat, and has two legs.

  Goddess of caves and grottoes: bless your children.

  Theology

  AT SCHOOL WE prayed a lot. There was nothing to it. Every morning in the home-room, a little scriptural reading, too, and more in assemblies, the principal pious over the P.A. system, the auditorium light-green like a hospital, whispering and shuffling among the rows of quite-new seats, and after the prayer the daily exhortation to pick up your gum wrappers. This was in
the age of ducktails; there was a lot of gum around.

  Once the Latin teacher said in a horrified voice: Don’t put the attendance slip there! Not on top of the Bible!

  Here is what I would think about during the prayers, and sometimes in Latin class, too. If Heaven is a good place and preferable to earth, why is murdering good people bad? Wouldn’t you be doing them a favour, since that way they’d get up there sooner? Only murdering bad people should be bad, since they weren’t about to go to Heaven anyway. But if they were bad enough, surely they deserved to be murdered. So murdering both good people and bad people was actually quite good, all things considered: to the good people you’d be giving a helping hand, to the bad ones their just deserts.

  I told some of this to my friend S., on the way home from school, past the Bayview movie theatre with its ceiling pocked with spitballs, past Kresge’s with its dim lighting and wooden floors and brooches made from dyed feathers and gilt picture-frames containing, for display purposes, murkily coloured photographs of movie stars from ten years before; where, it was rumoured, you would end up working if you flunked your year or slipped up badly in a back seat. We wore pencil skirts then, shortie coats, velveteen ballerina-shoes that caved out at the arches after a few wearings.

  What interested me was the thought of all those righteous murders, and the people who would do them. I had my ideas about that; even among the high-school teachers you could tell who wouldn’t, who would enjoy it, who would say it was all for the best. Religion, it seemed to me, could get out of hand.

  My friend S. went to the Unitarians, who sang badly but had kind ideas. At Christmas her family did their tree in a theme, all blue gauze or all silver balls, not haphazard like the rest of us.

  S. thought about the murder theory, but not for long. She did not think I was being serious.

  God is the good in people, she would say, from time to time.

  Like vitamins in milk? I’d ask. So if everyone died that would be the end of God?

  No, she would say. I don’t know. I need a cigarette. Don’t make me dizzy.

  An 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 grey 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 storeys 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.

  Poppies: Three Variations

  In Flanders fields the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row.

  That mark our place; and in the sky

  The larks, still bravely singing, fly

  Scarce heard amid the guns below.

  –John McCrae

  1.

  I HAD AN uncle once who served in Flanders. Flanders, or was it France? I’m old enough to have had the uncle but not old enough to remember. Wherever, those fields are green again, and ploughed and harvested, though they keep throwing up rusty shells, broken skulls. The uncle wore a beret and marched in parades, though slowly. We always bought those felt poppies, which aren’t even felt any more, but plastic: small red explosions pinned to your chest, like a blow to the heart. Between the other thoughts, that one crosses my mind. And the tiny lead soldiers in the shop windows, row on row of them, not lead any more, too poisonous, but every detail perfect, and from every part of the world: India, Africa, China, America. That goes to show, about war – in retrospect it becomes glamour, or else a game we think we could have played better. From time to time the stores mark them down, you can get bargains. There are some for us, too, with our new leafy flag, not the red rusted-blood one the men fought under. That uncle had place-mats with the old flag, and cups and saucers. The planes in the sky were tiny then, almost comical, like kites with wind-up motors; I’ve seen them in movies. The uncle said he never saw the larks. Too much smoke, or fog. Too much roaring, though on some mornings it was very still. Those were the most dangerous. You hoped you would act bravely when the moment came, you kept up your courage by singing. There was a kind of fly that bred in the corpses, there were thousands of them he said; and during the bombardments you could scarce hear yourself think. Though sometimes you heard things anyway: the man beside him whispered, “Look,” and when he looked there was no more torso: just a red hole, a wet splotch in mid-air. That uncle’s gone now too, the number of vets in the parade is smaller each year, they limp more. But in the windows the soldiers multiply, so clean and colourfully painted, with their little intricate guns, their shining boots, their faces, brown or pink or yellow, neither smiling nor frowning. It’s strange to think how many soldiers like that have been owned over the years, loved over the years, lost over the years, in backyards or through gaps in porch floors. They’re lying down there, under our feet in the garden and below the floorboards, armless or legless, faces worn half away, listening to everything we say, waiting to be dug up.

  2.

  Cup of coffee, the usual morning drug. He’s off jogging, told her she shouldn’t be so sluggish, but she can’t get organized, it involves too many things: the right shoes, the right outfit, and then worrying about how your bum looks, wobbling along the street. She couldn’t do it alone anyway, she might get mugged. So instead she’s sitting remembering how much she can no longer remember, of who she used to be, who she thought she would turn into when she grew up. We are the dead: that’s about the only line left from In Flanders Fields, which she had to write out twenty times on the blackboard, for talking. When she was ten and thin, and now see. He says she should go vegetarian, like him, healthy as lettuce. She’d rather eat poppies, get the opiates straight from the source. Eat daffodils, the poisonous bulb like an onion. Or better, slice it into his soup. He’ll blow his nose on her once too often, and then. Between the rock and the hard cheese, that’s where she sits, inert as a prisoner, making little crosses on the wall, like knitting, counting the stitches row on row, that old trick to mark off the days. Our place, he calls this dump. He should speak for himself, she’s just the mattress around here, she’s just the cleaning lady, and when he ever lifts a finger there’ll be sweet pie in the sky. She should burn the whole thing down, just for larks; still, however bravely she may talk, to herself, where would she go after that, what would she do? She thinks
of the bunch of young men they saw, downtown at night, where they’d gone to dinner, his birthday. High on something, singing out of tune, one guy’s fly half-open. Freedom. Catch a woman doing that, panty alert, she’d be jumped by every creep within a mile. Too late to make yourself scarce, once they get the skirt up. She’s heard of a case like that, in a poolhall or somewhere. That’s what keeps her in here, in this house, that’s what keeps her tethered. It’s not a mid-life crisis, which is what he says. It’s fear, pure and simple. Hard to rise above it. Rise above, like a balloon or the cream on milk, as if all it takes is hot air or fat. Or will-power. But the reason for that fear exists, it can’t be wished away. What she’d need in real life is a few guns. That and the technique, how to use them. And the guts, of course. She pours herself another cup of coffee. That’s her big fault: she might have the gun but she wouldn’t pull the trigger. She’d never be able to hit a man below the belt.

  3.

  In school, when I first heard the word Flanders I thought it was what nightgowns were made of. And pyjamas. But then I found it was a war, more important to us than others perhaps because our grandfathers were in it, maybe, or at least some sort of ancestor. The trenches, the fields of mud, the barbed wire, became our memories as well. But only for a time. Photographs fade, the rain eats away at statues, the neurons in our brains blink out one by one, and goodbye to vocabulary. We have other things to think about, we have lives to get on with. Today I planted five poppies in the front yard, orangey-pink, a new hybrid. They’ll go well with the marguerites. Terrorists blow up airports, lovers slide blindly in between the sheets, in the soft green drizzle my cat crosses the street; in the spring regatta the young men row on, row on, as if nothing has happened since 1913, and the crowds wave and enjoy their tall drinks with cucumber and gin. What’s wrong with that? We can scrape by, more or less, getting from year to year with hardly a mark on us, as long as we know our place, don’t mouth off too much or cause uproars. A little sex, a little gardening, flush toilets and similar discreet pleasures; and in the sky the satellites go over, keeping a bright eye on us. The ospreys, the horned larks, the shrikes and the woodland warblers are having a thinner time of it, though still bravely trying to nest in the lacunae left by pesticides, the sharp blades of the reapers. If it’s singing you want, there’s lots of that, you can tune in any time; coming out of your airplane seat-mate’s earphones it sounds like a fly buzzing, it can drive you crazy. So can the news. Disaster sells beer, and this month hurricanes are the fashion, and famines: scarce this, scarce that, too little water, too much sun. With every meal you take huge bites of guilt. The excitement in the disembodied voices says: you heard it here first. Such a commotion in the mid-brain! Try meditation instead, be thankful for the annuals, for the smaller mercies. You listen, you listen to the moonlight, to the earthworms revelling in the lawn, you celebrate your own quick heartbeat. But below all that there’s another sound, a ground swell, a drone, you can’t get rid of it. It’s the guns, which have never stopped, just moved around. It’s the guns, still firing monotonously, bored with themselves but deadly, deadlier, deadliest, it’s the guns, an undertone beneath each ordinary tender conversation. Say pass the sugar and you hear the guns. Say I love you. Put your ear against skin: below thought, below memory, below everything, the guns.