Three Moments of an Explosion (48 page)

“How did it get here?” I said.

“
Here
here?” he said, pointing right at it, “or
here
here?” He circled his finger to indicate the world. “I don’t know. And I think it would not be sensible for me to pursue such enquiries.” He spoke with odd formality. “If there are those who know how it got here, I should avoid their company.” He looked at me. “But you and I will talk.”

I came south. He looked me over when I alighted: I had lost weight. We bicycled to the Downs, and contentedly munched sandwiches in a basin of clay. It was an unusually hot afternoon. One of those days all slowly ambling bumblebees and honeysuckle and so forth, at which the English countryside, when it puts its mind to it, excels, and quite unlike any summer day anywhere else. Calm and still and lovely, but never without a sense of something impending. The sort of day one misses even as one experiences it.

“So how are you getting on up there?” William said tightly.

“Muddling through,” I said. “It won’t be for much longer.” He nodded.

“I’m sure,” William said at last, “I could say what you chaps thought happened, in Glasgow.” He took a bite of bread, a puff of cigarette, a swig of cider. “But I can’t scrimshaw, Gerald. Not a notion how.” He gave me quite a smile. “It’s a queer thing to know your colleagues think you a thief of corpses for necromantic art. Who narrowly escaped jail …”

“Not everyone,” I told him. “Some of us …”

He waved his hand to hush me. “I didn’t carve it, but I did take the bloody body,” he said. And as the light grew slowly thick and the shadows long he told me all of it, his story, which I have, with a few omissions and a few emendations, outlined here.

It was obvious he could tell I believed every word he said. I could see his relief at my lack of doubt. Only his description of the body’s early nights in the tenements elicited some shock from me.

We had a hair-raising time of it cycling back to the station in time for our train.

I was privileged to work with William for many years after that. I even ran one of his charities for a time after his death. I was not good at it, but I wanted to do my best for him.

It was after the war, when his initial coolness towards the new National Health Service metamorphosed into enthusiasm, that William’s career blossomed. He was not a political man, but through his work in teaching hospitals in the 1950s he became committed to what is now called “social medicine.” It was for his efforts in this field that he was ultimately granted an OBE. He took great interest in pedagogy: he was a good teacher, though one who was easily sidetracked. His name is now attached to a surgical technique, an honor he would have pooh-poohed, and that I think would have delighted him.

William was provocative on medical ethics. Not only did he support a presumed-consent model of organ donation, but he insisted that without explicit instructions to the contrary, everyone should be considered to have offered up their bodies to medical science. “William,” I would scold, “that is ridiculous. You don’t mean it.”

“Certainly I do.” It was one of those arguments that people who’ve shared a lot for a long time are happy to perform in company. “You’re going to put me on the slab when
I
go,” he would insist. “So I can keep an eye on the class.” For all his joshing, he took the principle seriously. Not only did he sign his own body over, but he harangued his friends, insisted it was the duty of all doctors to make the same gesture. He went on at me in particular, of course, until at last I gave in and signed the form in front of him.

I once mooted returning to Glasgow together, to look again at the exhibit. “It won’t achieve anything,” William told me firmly.

“You know,” I said carefully. “
I
could do some sort of investigation into what happened.
You
might be in an awkward position, but I—”

“Gerald,” he said. “I don’t want you to draw attention to yourself. I don’t want
anyone
connected to whatever it is I stumbled on looking for me. Or for you.”

I nodded and looked away, remembering his young interlocutor. “Perhaps,” I said, “it’s just as well someone sent the police to your workshop. Before any other authorities could track you down.”

Whenever I watched him operate, I noticed William’s close observation of the bones. Perhaps he thought lightning might strike twice, or perhaps that it had not been random lightning the first time, but a message, for him. “There are days,” he said to me more than once, “when everyone I see looks like a candidate. As if the world is full of designs.”

It would not have been hard to check William’s own bones. I put it to him. I tapped his knee. “A little anesthetic?” I said, and he looked at me curiously. He mumbled a platitude about God refusing to prove His own existence. I think certainty either way would still have been excruciating to him, as he had admitted to the girl it would be, years before.

None of us have to obey instructions. I consider my own existence proof of that. So much of life is cobbled together when plans go awry. That is often where happiness comes from.

As soon as I was able, I wound up my loose ends in Durham and, eager for change, came permanently south. William and I moved into a house we could not really afford.

More than once in those early years one or other of us would go off for a few days, without much explanation. I did so after that day on the Downs. At other times it was William who disappeared, to return in contemplative mood.

We were always scrupulously respectful of each other’s secrets. I did not discuss his trips with him, but it took only a cursory search to find Scottish papers and ticket stubs to Glasgow among his things, for all his stern words to me about that destination. Only once did he ever make mention of any such journey. Years later, after two days’ absence, William cleared his throat and poured himself some tea and said, “It’s gone.”

I eventually said, “They change their exhibitions, museums, from time to time.” That was that.

Perhaps on my own returns, William sought evidence as I did. He must have been disappointed if so: I was more careful than he, and never one for mementos or trophies, even after successful searches. He would find no telltale tickets, no scribbled directions through Glasgow tenements, no old rag doll with fraying lips.

Very much later, when it became impossible to ignore the fact that William was dying, he began to speak about the design again. It was my task, by then, to let him talk of anything he wished. I am proud of how I did so, no matter if he ruminated in those last days on topics of which I wished he would not speak: on discarded drafts; on how it was the police got word of his researches and found him; on his inability to ever find the girl again. Elaborate theories about the design, not without surprising insights. Hardest of all, his own death.

At the very end, when he could barely move or see, he whispered to me, “Let Glasgow have me. Why not, eh? You never know, Gerald.” Then urgently: “Oh but, oh, but I wish, I do, I wish, I wish.”

I knew he longed for certainty, even as he purported to abjure it, to be part of something, but still it was very hard to hear this.

And so I gave him my hand as he wheezed in the bed, and he held it, and I whispered and put my other hand around his and clasped it. He squeezed back.

But though I was gentle I did not let up the pressure. William opened his eyes as I pressed his fingers into mine. I pressed his fingers so he could feel the bones beneath my thin old skin. I did not speak and neither did he. He did not speak ever again. He watched me and his eyes grew wider with something other than surprise and at the sight of them I had to close my own.

William’s body was delivered to our long-haired student descendants, as he had wished.

That final pedagogic task uncovered nothing unusual. A few years later, when his demonstrations were done, his body was released. It rests now in a lovely cemetery, as close to those Downs as we could arrange.

I sat alone in the kitchen, in a world in which beautiful, elegantly wrought secrets lie hidden less than an inch from sight. I sat in my pajamas drinking tea among those bones, and I told William in his absence that I was sorry he was at best a bystander. I told him I was sorry he’d never been able to find his young confidante, for vindication, to know again that someone other than he had seen the full design uncovered, released.

I’m sad as I approach my own death, but I am tired of so missing whom I miss. I am tired of secrets.

The skeleton will not appear again, in that museum or anywhere. The only person other than me in whom William ever confided will never speak of it. But for this document, which it is an immense relief to write, the story would end with me.

All the arrangements are taken care of. I’m touched at the thought of friends coming to a service for me. I would tell them not to bother, but I know they will and that it will be for them.

It is not a pleasant thing to break a promise to the dead, but I must urgently draw attention to the updated instructions about my funeral and remains, the version of the document I changed after William’s death. Glasgow Medical School will now receive a larger monetary bequest than they expected, in lieu of the cadaver previously promised. My plot, in the same cemetery as William’s, was paid for long ago, but I will not be using it. Instead, I ask that my ashes be scattered on William’s grave.

Perhaps mice will run over us, William and me, with designs beneath their fur. How glad William would have been to know with certainty that a few of his theories were correct! That in the darkest parts of the sea the bones of great fish and whales are scrawled on. That the sky is full of birds taking their designs heavenward.

I should warn whoever grants my last request that the ashes from cremation are coarser than those from any fireplace or cigarettes. No need for alarm at the sight of that distinctive bone grit on the grass where my William lies. A little coastal wind and I shall dissipate. One rainfall, and I will, you have my word, sink toward him, out of sight.

To Maria

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m indebted to all who helped me with these stories, especially Jamie Allinson, Mark Bould, Nadia Bouzidi, Mic Cheetham, Meehan Crist, Rupa DasGupta, Andrea Gibbons, RL Goldberg, Maria Dahvana Headley, Chris John, Simon Kavanagh, John McDonald, Jemima Miéville, Karen Mirza, Susie Nicklin, Helen Oyeyemi, Anne Perry, Sue Powell, Maggie Powers, Max Schaefer, Richard Seymour, Jared Shurin, Julien Thuan, and Rosie Warren.

My sincere thanks to those editors who worked on various of these pieces: Ben Eastham and Jacques Testard; Justin McGuirk; Richard Lea; Jordan Bass; David Leavitt; Yuka Igarashi; Omar Kholeif, and all at F.A.C.T. Liverpool. I’m deeply grateful to Nick Blake, Rob Cox, Julie Crisp, Jessica Cuthbert-Smith, Sam Eades, and all at Pan Macmillan; and Keith Clayton, Penelope Haynes, David Moench, Tricia Narwani, Scott Shannon, Annette Szlachta-McGinn, Mark Tavani, Betsy Wilson, and all at Random House Del Rey. Several of the stories in this collection were written during a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, then as a residency fellow of the Lannan Foundation. I am profoundly grateful to both organizations for their generous support.

BY CHINA MIÉVILLE

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Perdido Street Station

The Scar

Iron Council

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Un Lun Dun

The City & The City

Kraken

Embassytown

Railsea

Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

China Mieville is the award-winning author of several books, including
The City & The City
and
Embassytown
. He lives and works in London.