Of Dust, Of Bone, Of Soul

by Jay McKenzie

The sun set in the east tonight.

I thought people would be more concerned, panicking even. But the news channels are filled with twittering East Coasters celebrating how lovely it was to have the late afternoon sunlight flooding their kitchens.

“Come, Axel.”

            Pirie and I make our way on foot to the bus depot, wait in line in the encroaching darkness with throngs of desperate folk who flood the city each day in search of hope: a job, a home, a mysterious benefactor.

Pirie smiles lightly, pats her satchel.

            A security guard traverses the line half-heartedly nudging travellers onto the crowded trolley-buses with his stick. “Move along, please.” He nods to Pirie and me with a vague flicker of recognition.

Pirie is adept at angling her body so that the satchel and its precious contents are protected from the press of the crowds. We tuck into the other travellers, my damp palm in hers. The smooth leather satchel hangs between us.

“Have you heard?” says a commuter to no-one in particular. “The Earth started spinning the other way today.”

I can’t read the look that Pirie gives me, but the tightening in my guts tells me that we’re about to get busy.

“Electro-magnetic confusion,” nods an old man with hair sprouting from his ears. “No big deal. It’ll re-correct itself in a day or two.”

Pirie rolls her eyes.

            She’s beautiful, I think, fighting the urge to stroke her salt-white cheek.

#

Passing the shanty towns and rubbish dumps that fortify the city, the bus expels passengers like swarming ants returning to their nests. By the end of the line—the rubble of what was once Tantarlo—Pirie and I are the only riders.

She keeps her voice low. “We’re going to be busy, Axel. Promise you can keep it together.”

            I swallow hard, nod.

            When the earthquake took Tantarlo, I was a mess. My hands quivered and I dropped stitches and wept with every incision. In the end, Pirie gripped my face between her hands.

“This isn’t about you, Axel,” she’d hissed.

            “I’ll be fine,” I tell her now as we disembark into the night. Because everyone I love, except you, is already dead.

Pirie untethers the old dray we tied in the guts of what used to be a church. We’re still an hour or so from the cave, and my lids are heavy as the cracked boulders that pepper the valley.

We climb onto the horse's back, and, as if reading my mind, Pirie says, “Sleep Axel. You need your strength.”

#

It’s always impossible to know whether it is day or night in here. Sunlight cannot penetrate the depths of the cavern we’ve selected to work from, so the only natural light comes from a lost firefly, or the faint pearly glow from the vials lining the stone bench.

Last night, Pirie’s long fingers lifted the glass tubes from her satchel as she squinted at the labels looped around their necks. Then she used one of the vials as a torch, took the bones out one by one and read the inscription she had carved into their clean, white surfaces. She laid them beside the corresponding vial, and nodded, satisfied.

I enjoy watching her make order of this strange business we’ve found ourselves in.

My fist is clenched around another vial: this one emits a weak, citrine light, and at times, the contents jerk as though falling in sleep. I don’t remember taking it out last night. Gently, I nudge it back into the small leather pouch I keep under my sleeping bag.

“Axel, come look.”

            I stretch, rub the crusted sleep-motes from my eyes and head towards the disembodied echo of her voice.

            “Ow.”

I know these damp rock walls better than I know my own hand, but today, I stumble. There’s a fug pressing into my temples and my balance is off. I briefly wonder if I’m getting sick, or whether everyone gets disrupted equilibrium at the foothills of an apocalypse.

            “Axel, hurry.”

            I push on, steadying myself against the rock.

            Pirie is silhouetted against the buttery wash of morning, arms outstretched like those crucifixion statues of old. She turns as I approach, frowns.

“Oh. You look like death!”

            “I’m fine,” I lie. “What did you want to show me?”

            She regards me just a fraction longer, then turns, points to the sky.

            The pale sun reminds me of the communion wafers they’d lay gently on our tongues at church. Light as air, insubstantial. There was little left but papery mush by the time the priest brought the bitter wine to wash it down. I’d leave my tongue poking out, trying to keep the wafer dry and intact.

You win, mum would whisper, nudging me gently. I’m like a Hungry Hungry Hippo.

            She’d flap her tongue around, lumpen with pulpy mess as we tried not to giggle.

            “Look.” Pirie drags me back to the now.

            A small black arc takes a bite from the sun. Neat, clean. Then it grows, shadow making an ever decreasing crescent of the sun.

            “It’s going east to west,” says Pirie.

            I shudder, fold my arms across my chest. A thin breeze shifts through the scrubby trees, rustling what’s left of their curling, dead leaves.

            “So you think this is it?”

            Our eyes meet. Hers gleam. My body, reflected back to me in her jet black pupils, is hunched.

            “This is it, Axel.”

            The shadow of the moon has almost engulfed the sun’s disc. A flash, and the thin remaining crescent burns like lit magnesium powder. The valley darkens, the wind screeches across the cave mouth, cold and mean and sorrowful. And then the sun is gone.

            Pirie holds her breath. A fraction of a beat, surely, then a second flash will mark the end of the eclipse.

            We wait. I count the seconds, ten, twenty, thirty, then stop.

            “I think it’s stopped moving, Axel.”

            Come on, moon. Keep moving, I will it. But nothing happens.

#

This time, it’s a wave. Pirie grasps my fingers hard as the trembling black wall of water crashes into the basin of the city, obliterating high-rises and slumlords in one smashing crescendo. It screams and crashes and roars, and the foundations of the rock upon which we stand quakes. 

            From up here at the yawning mouth of the cave, it is a toy town: a child wreaking havoc on his model railway, his dollhouse. A mere plaything, trivial and flattened that can be rebuilt tomorrow.

            But of course, this is not a toy. This is a city that holds nearly ten million souls.

            Held.

#

I’m steadier than last time. Before I even pick up the first vial, I check for tremors in my fingers through the flickering candlelight. Nothing, though the fug still gathers by my ears like an awaiting rainstorm.

            Needles long and short lie side by side on the slab I’ve chosen as a table. Pirie proffers a bone: a tibia, picked clean but riddled with cracks and calcite deposits. No wonder he was keen to give it up, I think, remembering the way the wheelchair-bound scientist let Pirie perform the amputation.

I select an embroidery hook, nod to Pirie to uncork the vial that has his vital information scarfed around the neck. Jairus Sudirman, it reads. Astrophysicist/reproductively functional/disease free.

The glowing mass in the tube undulates like rising vapour as I dip the eye of the needle into it. I wait for the catch, then draw a sinewy strand that trails my needle out of the vial. The opalescent, bluish hue is enough for me to work by.

My mother taught me to sew in that cramped house we lived in on Senopati. Scraps of old jute sacking and cheaply discarded t-shirts, my samples, until I got a proper apprenticeship.

You’re better than I could have hoped to be, she said, under the jaundiced glow of the bare bulb in the kitchen. She was luminous in her praise.

I love you, mama.

I know, son. And one day, you’ll find someone else who loves you just as much as I do. Then my work here will be done.

She couldn’t have imagined it would lead me to this.

I hand the knitted bone to Pirie, suffused now with a phosphorescent glow. She carries it reverently to one of the small enclaves that halo my workshop. What Pirie does with my finished work, I have never witnessed, though I sometimes catch the echo of her whispered incantations.

The next tube belongs to Laz Woolfe, leader of the EcoFree Movement and a hero in Pirie’s mind. I bristle as I recall the extraction kiss she performed on him just a few weeks ago. Her eyes were closed when she pressed her lips to his, and when she hooked a finger inside her cheek to pluck out the soulstrand, there was a pinkish spread across her cheeks.

I shake it from my mind, choose my needle, uncork the vial.

#

We work hard, stopping only to check whether the sun is still shadowed by the moon. Both remain still, frozen in their ecliptic embrace.

            When I hand the last bone—a glowing metacarpal—to Pirie, she strokes my hair.

            “You did so well, Axel.” A small kiss, on the top of my head.

            I’d do anything for you, I think, but bite my tongue to stop the irretractable statement from tumbling out.

            She carries the bone to the final empty antechamber, throwing a smile over her shoulder.

            I stand, crack my neck, then my fingers one by one. Though the cloudy sensation in my head is still there, it’s dissipating, and I’m ravenous.

            At the cave mouth, I set about building a fire, angling the copper cauldron over its flame. We have prepared for this, the hunger that follows our work. And not just ours.

Perhaps it's the bubbling broth that rouses the reticent sun and moon from their Sleeping Beauty slumber. Or maybe, like the aftermath of a one-night-stand, they realise their mistake in coming together. Whatever the reason, the moon dusts himself off and continues his journey east to west, leaving a weak, spent sun in his wake.

            I blink hard.

            In the light, the city is now a sea littered with the debris of ten million lives, swallowed and thrashed and spat out. I press the heel of my hands into my eyes, burning now with hot tears. There was no one there left for me to lose, but still, the wave has washed the cobwebbed memories of my childhood and pulled them to the depths of a watery graveyard.

            “Hello.”

            I turn. A man wrapped in nothing but a thin sarong emerges from inside the cave.

            “Come,” I say. “You must be hungry.”

            He approaches on tentative legs: a newborn foal learning to walk. He strokes the skin of his forearm, stares at his outstretched palm.

            “Jairus, isn’t it? Sit. It can take a while to get used to your new form.”

            The man lowers himself to the dust-smattered ground. “I…” he starts, “I’m changed.”

I nod. “Yes. On the outside, you are changed. But inside? You are exactly who you’ve always been.”

            Jairus smiles warily, as though weighing up if that’s a good or a bad thing.

            I scoop him a cup of broth and together we watch the sun start a halting descent to the east.

            In time, we are joined by the others: men, women, roused from the depths of the cavern as new versions of themselves, fifty in all.

            There are tears for who they were and who they loved, followed by the ecstatic realisation that they have survived.

            Pirie helps the last one from the cave as the sun sets, leading a shaky young man to join the group around the fire. She then snakes around my feet, resting her head upon my lap. I curl a strand of her hair around my finger and let out a sigh. We will both sleep well tonight.

Talk amongst the rejuvenated turns to the reconstruction of a New World, the convening of other rejuvenated bands. Pirie tugs at my hand—our cue to leave. I stand, bow lightly to Jairus who still sits by my side.

            “Ah!” he exclaims, drawing the attention of the rest of the group. “But we haven’t thanked you two. Our Collector, our Weaver.”

            We allow them to sweep us into grateful kisses and vice-strong embraces, and I sag as Laz Woolfe holds Pirie just a little too long. By the time we are released, the valley is cloaked in thick darkness, the ruin of the city blanketed and forgotten.

#

We are enveloped in one another, cocooned in my sleeping bag.

            “Do you remember the day we met?” she asks.

            In the low flicker of candlelight, she can’t see my smile, but I’ve no doubt she can hear it in my voice.

            “Of course.”

            Of course I remember. I remember that the bell in the tannery sounded different when she entered, and when I looked up from my work, my breath stuttered as my eyes met hers. I remember the garnet bead of blood on my finger that I didn’t even notice until she pointed out that I’d pricked myself, her knotted knuckles flexing as she dabbed it clean. I remember her remarking on the satchel I was stitching in a tan hide—the satchel that she carries to this day. And I remember her whispering that I should meet her in the Kelapa Club after dark, because she had an “exciting opportunity” for a talented weaver.

            She taps my chest. “I’d been to your house. Your mother told me where to find you.”

            “You…you met my mother?”

            She nods.

I can’t picture my effervescent Pirie in our modest Tantarlo apartment. My mother kept the place spotless, her gratitude that I had earned enough to get us out of the city. But still, it wasn’t much. And why had Pirie gone there in the first place?

            “They’d been watching you,” she says as though reading my mind. “They told me where to find you.”

            She strokes her thumb across my cheek.

            “Your mother was lovely.” Pirie nuzzles into my neck. “The kind of mother I wish I’d had.”

            I swallow, my throat tight as it always is when I think of her proudly packing me off to work each morning, kissing me gently on the cheek.

            That last day before the earthquake, I’d asked Pirie if any of my mother’s soulstrands were still on my skin.

            Faintly, she said. But yes.

            Inadvertently, I look to where the pouch nestles under my sleeping bag. Useless, I know, to hang onto the content without a bone, but still, I can’t let it go.

            Pirie is sitting now, fumbling in her satchel.

            “I went there, Axel. I went to your apartment. Or what was left of it.”

            “What? When?”

            “When you were sleeping. After Tantarlo.”

            I close my eyes, inhale. “And?”

One, two fingers uncurl from her clenched fist. Three, four. In her palm rests a thin white fragment of something. It could be a tooth, a nail, or worse still, a chipped pebble, a fleck of chalk.

            “Is this…?” My fingers reach for it, retract, and I push them under my thigh to quell the tremble. “How did you…?”

            “I’m a collector, Axel. It’s what I do.”

            “And you are sure this is her?”

            “As sure as I can be. I mean…” she stops herself. “You don’t need details Axel. You need faith.”

            The thin flame dances in her eyes. Beyond the cave mouth, the chatter of the rejuvenated is fading and there is only Pirie and I and this scrap of possibility—too big, too stifling for the thin air of the cave.

            “Why now?”

            “I needed your focus, Axel. For what we did last night.”

            “But she wasn’t assigned,” I say. “They could lock you away for this. Or worse.”

Pirie lifts my palm to her lips, lays a gentle kiss on the railroads of lines crisscrossing the surface. Then she tips the sliver of bone onto it.

            “Here when you need me,” she says.

#

I’ve etched her name into the dirt, drawn a circle around it. 

Tabitha Nain, it reads. I lay the smooth chip of bone within it, the vial by its side.

Is this what you would want, mama?

I unfurl my needle roll, trail my fingertips across the points. This fragment is tiny; it will require some skilled craftsmanship to keep the piece intact and weave enough of the soulstrand through it to make it viable.

You’re incredible, Axel, she’d breathed, squinting at the intricate frangipani I’d embroidered around her cross stitch. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life, it read.

She had made it for the widow next door.

Do you believe it, mama? I’d asked.

She’d smiled, ruffled my hair. Pretty maudlin topic for a young tannery apprentice!

I sigh.

The work is hard, the fragment soft. My eyes smart in the pale glow of the vial, squinting to make sure every strand is woven into the tiny shard. I don’t know how long I work, but I am tying off the last threads as Pirie lays a hand on my shoulder.

“Are you ready?”

I stand, bone clutched in my palm. “I can’t believe you did this for me, Pirie.”

She shrugs, looks at her feet.

And one day, you’ll find someone else who loves you just as much as I do. The voice is clear, but I know it’s in my head.

Pirie holds out her hand for the completed bone.

Then my work here will be done.

I blink, tuck the bone into my pocket, take Pirie’s hand.

“I love you.” The words are alien and clunky. She presses her mouth to my ear.

“I love you too.”