Emma Bull - Bone Dance

Even so, I think this must be three-quarters lying. I can’t have remembered everything; and the process of trying is like reconstructing a dream. You put the connective tissue in where it never existed, because without it, you’ve got, not a narrative, but a string of senseless images.

I don’t trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff left on the sand when the tide of experience recedes. As long as they’re part of that process, there’s something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.

But what if something exists only as a remembrance, that was never an experience? What if it even leaves artifacts in the mind: English, Spanish, French, and a thorough knowledge of semiconductor electronics? These, in me, began as pure memory, untroubled by life or the sensible continuity of time. The experience came later.

What if Sleeping Beauty woke behind the briers alone, in the dark, to the knowledge that the curse was not sleep but waking, and that family, childhood, fairy godmothers and all were dreams spun to amuse a virgin mind in mothballs?

She/he/it would have no choice but to make something of the awakening. I do, as best I can.

Theo and I, in a rash moment over a flask of cherry brandy, resolved to restore the old municipal telephone system to replace Albrecht’s graft– and bribery-powered party lines. After three months of learning experiences, we have half an exchange up; but it’s interesting work.

I found that Loretta, the old woman at China Black’s house, was right: communal hydro generators, regularly spaced along the riverbank, are a reasonably cheap and reliable method for getting power to most of the City. We have four running so far.

Now that the power monopoly is broken, a surprising amount of photovoltaic technology is turning up. Surprising to me, anyway. Last week a storm took the roofing off a house on the south end of town and revealed three solar panels hidden in the rafters. I went down to direct the salvaging of them, and felt like an archaeologist who’d found the library at Alexandria intact.

People come to me for things like that, and for information, and training. I’m learning to talk to them. I’m learning to live with being recognized on the street. A frightening number of people know who I am, and even what I am, and I have to get on with life as if that didn’t matter. Someday maybe it won’t.

I said this was therapy. I think Sher wanted me to see that my life is not a finished story. I already know that, but maybe she doesn’t realize I do. Such a surprising number of people left alive at the end, our narrator included. Do they just stop then, suspended with one foot hanging in midair, one breath half drawn?

“You may tell them,” Frances said, “that Little Nell lived.” She was lying on her back under the Hoodoo Engineers’ big tree, eyes closed, hands limp on the grass. I’d told her about writing this.

“Oh, a tragedy,” I said.

“And that as soon as Little Nell recovers from having her intestines shortened by an inch, she will be a much more interesting person, and it won’t be safe to say things like that.”

“Or necessary, I suppose.”

She raised her eyebrows and her eyelids at the same time.

“I’d thought that you’d want to leave.”

Frances looked up into the boughs and smiled. “Maybe. Eventually. But not until I run out of amusements. It should be damned amusing to be underfoot and in the way while you build the New Jerusalem. I want to write my name in the wet cement.”

I look forward to that.

I liked the idea of a Dickensian ending. But I don’t know yet who marries, who dies, who has offspring and how many. Theo’s father survived the stroke, but his health is uncertain; he’s as fragile as Frances and, unlike her, will remain so the rest of his life. I think he and Theo have said things to each other they weren’t used to saying, and that it did them both good; but I wasn’t there.

I couldn’t say why Sherrea believes the story isn’t done. I know why I do. It’s because Myra Kincaid was right: I haven’t a clue. There is a whole class of answers to life’s big questions that, when examined closely, proves to be nothing but another set of questions. I now know my origins, body and soul. That’s like knowing that magnetic tape is iron oxide particles bonded to plastic film. Wonderful—now, what’s it/or? What does it do !

It does, I suppose, what it has to. It does what it loves to do, or what needs doing. It helps others do the same. So I do that. And sometimes, lying on my back in an inch of cold water with a socket wrench in my hand, or teaching someone how to use a soldering iron, or constructing witty segues between songs on the balcony at the Underbridge, I can feel it, very close: the power and clarity and brilliance, the strength and lightness, that I had once in a dream, a dream of dancing, a hoodoo dream. Maybe in time—nine months? nine years?—I’ll finally have a clue.

I’ve found a videotape, a home dub that someone kept, of several weeks’ worth of a TV comedy show. I like it. It’s funny. But my favorite part, the part I play at the Underbridge when the windows are colorless with dawn, when Theo has fallen asleep with his head on the mixing board, when Robby is marching up and down the dance floor with a broom on his shoulder, is the end of each one. Then the woman whose show it is walks out to her audience and the cameras in a ratty pink chenille bathrobe, grinning, and says, “Go home! Go home!”

She’s made as much sense of the world as she can for one week. She hands it off to the audience. I love her then.

Go home! Go home!

And the house lights go up.