Emma Bull - Bone Dance

A dead, sunken face, a shaved head, a mummified naked body. There was a corpse in the box. There were eight boxes in the room, all alike. When, frightened, I turned my eyes away, I saw my own legs and feet, attached to the rest of me, bordered by a box with an open glass lid. I began to scream. I don’t know why; it was an instinct toward terror, a dread of being just like the eight dead things in the room. And of course I was, but for one small detail.

I scrabbled out of the box and fell, and learned that I couldn’t breathe in water. There was almost three feet of it on the floor. I dragged myself up the side of my resting place. On the walls above some of the coffin-boxes, red lights flashed. Warning, alert, something needs attention, system failure. It babbled through my head. Later I knew I’d understood the purpose of the lights, but not then.

I had a sudden clear knowledge, like another instinct, of electrocution and the conductivity of water. I staggered clumsily through the flood (the strangeness of that came to me later: I was born knowing how to walk) to a door (sight of it, and the word springing into my head, door, and the understanding of what it did), which I pounded and pushed on. Finally I found a lever in the wall next to it, which turned.

The door crashed inward on its hinges. It and the water that had leaned on it for—years?—threw me back into the room. One of the mummies floated past me, upward; another followed it. The water had broken the boxes open.

And then, when I had to know it, I knew how to swim. I lurched toward the ceiling of that underwater enamel house, sucked air out of the rapidly diminishing space there, and kicked out against the pressure, toward the door.

I learned eventually that it was the water of Lake Pontchartrain I was struggling against. The place where I came up, under a full moon with mist rising white from the surface into the cooler air of a midsummer night, was Bayou St. John. Three weeks later a hurricane added it all to the New Orleans basin.

“How long ago was that?” Frances asked after a little space of quiet had settled between us.

“Fifteen—almost sixteen years, now.”

She leaned her head back and smiled. “Mmm. If I’m right, you’re eighty or more. If you’re right, you’ve barely reached the Golden Age of Skepticism. Either way, you hardly look it.”

I don’t know what I’d expected from the first person to hear that story, but I found Frances’s response oddly comforting. Just another bizarre, life-threatening adventure. How many of them had she had? I went to pour hot water into the teapot.

There were a few cookies, bought maybe a week ago in the mall market, in a tin on the shelf. They weren’t fresh, but they had refused to go stale, either. I carried the tin, along with the teapot and my other mug, over to the desk and set them on the corner nearest her. She looked at the two mugs and said, “Entertain often?”

“I only have an extra for when I’m too lazy to wash the first one. If you were me, would you have a lot of close friends?”

“In my own fashion, I’m under the same constraints. And you’re right, I don’t. It’s a furtive little life, but it’s all mine.” She chewed carefully. “Better already. Butter and sugar, in sufficient quantity, will cure anything.” She ate and worked on her tea as if that were all she could concentrate on, and maybe it was. I’d done my talking; I was prepared to sit, and watch, and see what happened.

At last she set the cup down and slid her hands over her face. “Thank you. God, I’m tired.” She closed her eyes, and I wondered if she meant to fall asleep there. Then she said, “If we’d been left to our own devices, I think none of the Horsemen would have willingly been within a hundred miles of each other. As predators go, we were more like tigers than wolves. Forcing us together like that just made us worse.”

“That gave you a taste for the furtive life?” I asked.

I expected her to ignore me, or, more likely, to turn one of her phrases that sounded impressive and gave away nothing. Instead, she said, “Christ, no. If it gave me a taste for anything… no, only a distaste. For myself, among other things.” She sighed and tipped her head back against the chair. It was harder to see her expression now. “What a damned waste of human potential it all was.”

“Turning Central America into an archipelago wasn’t enough of an accomplishment for you?”

“Is that the proper ambition of humankind? We had—we were like gods.” She gave a gasp of uncomfortable-sounding laughter. “We were like gods. Think of Zeus: He could turn himself into a shower of gold, and all he wanted to do was to cheat on his wife. We played savage practical jokes, ruined lives, and wreaked vengeance. That was our contribution to society.”

“Why did they keep you?”

“Who?”

“The army. Or whoever.”

“Why did they keep the stealth bomber? I’m sorry,” she said when I shook my head. “You don’t know what the stealth bomber was. Or you don’t remember. I suppose they’d spent too much money on us. Though, to be fair, we did exactly what we were meant to do, as long as we felt like it.”

“Which was?” I knew, in a vague way; but something told me that Frances discussing the past was a rare commodity. It seemed a shame to let her stop now, when, if she kept on, she might get to… something I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hear.

She drew her feet up in the chair, folded her arms over her knees, and propped her chin on her crossed wrists. “Objective,” she said crisply. My experience of lecturing professors was all from actors on video, but she reminded me of those. “To provide lousy intelligence and advice to El Presidente de la Republica Banana. Old-fashioned method: feed fake dispatches and phony coded orders to his intelligence staff, and hope they don’t realize it was too easy to get. Newfangled method: mount a Horseman on his Jefe de Seguridad, maybe another on his Secretary of State. Not only do you get hand delivery of your bogus information; you also get a highly placed double agent with an impenetrable cover. Que bueno, si? And that, of course, was only one of our many uses.”

“Did it work?”

Her grin was feral. “Sometimes. And before you ask, we’ll leave the exceptions decently buried, thank you. Since they ranged from the deeply shameful to the utterly horrific.”

“Why didn’t you just take the presidentes over and declare peace?”

“It may be,” she said, looking insufferably patient, “that you are fifteen, after all. Because the cabinet, the generals, and the God-damned janitorial staff would have blown El Presidente’s brains out and declared a change of government. Do you think a nation wages war because of one person in a big leather chair in a nice office?”

“Having never lived in a nation,” I said, “I wouldn’t know.”

Frances turned her face away, as if I’d slapped her. “Don’t worry, you’re not missing much. A wretched anthill of peaceful, productive, useful life with hardly any invigorating biting and scratching. Where people flossed once a day and mowed the lawn on Sundays.”

I watched her, and said, “It wasn’t your fault.”

One emphatic black eyebrow went up, and her straight mouth crimped with irony at the corners. “Thank you, I feel ever so much better. I suppose my sense of social responsibility makes up in vigor what it lacked in timeliness.”

“Could you have stopped them then?”

She paused to think about it. “Yes. Which is why I’m so assiduously stopping them now. Have been stopping them. It’s my penance. Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord Is With Thee would be easier, but it seems a shame to waste all that good marksmanship.”