When we had been under a long time, Mr. Tracy swam to me with the first Bone in his teeth. It was very warm when I took it from him. Holding either end, I pushed down and the thing snapped easily in half. I felt a charge of energy or power go up either arm, like bubbles in a glass of ginger ale. Halved, the two pieces were much lighter in my hands. On land, it had been rock-heavy and hard, but here in the water – the only place where the moon held sway – the Bone could and _had to_ be broken for us to succeed.
I swam to Pepsi and gestured for him to take one half. When he did, I swam a little away, then turned and faced him again. I held up my piece and nodded for him to do the same. When both our arms were up over our heads, an arc of purple light floated easily between the two parts of the Bone. There was no sound at all, no Van de Graf generator snapping static white electricity from one ground to the other. Between the pieces of bone, only a soft arcing purple light swam silently. It was very beautiful and not frightening at all.
Later we dried off in our clothes and sat by a fire Felina had brought from miles away. The dog gave me two knives of obsidian and I handed one to Pepsi. He took it and stabbed it into the earth a few times.
«Pepsi, tonight we're going to make our walking sticks with these pieces of bone. Watch me and you'll see how to do it.»
The animals retreated back into the darkness and we set to work carving the Bones of the Moon. Now and then I looked toward the water and saw that all the fish were near, watching us from just beneath the surface. Their eyes glowed.
Pepsi watched and learned three lifetimes' worth of carving in a few hours. Leaves and ocelots, a little man who looked like Alvin Williams, a woman's upturned hand filled with stones and frogs. . . . These figures and more wound up and around the pale, crooked sticks and ended up all entering the moon's broken face.
The campfire light flickered yellow and orange across our busy hands. I kept looking up to see if Pepsi was doing it right, to make sure he didn't cut himself. My heart jumped like a dolphin in my chest to see his little boy's face so tight with concentration and concern. The sharp wrinkles that were only visiting now would someday own his face and he would be a man. We would talk intelligently then and I would be the one to ask too many questions and want his constant attention. I loved knowing he would be a man. I hated knowing the boy would disappear into photograph albums and small worn-out blue jeans that ended up as window-cleaning rags.
He was finishing the figure of a racing car when he felt either my gaze or my sadness. Looking up abruptly, he asked if he could lick his stick when we were finished.
«Why would you want to do _that_?»
«Because it looks like it'll taste good.»
I laughed and said yes and felt better. He wasn't a man yet!
The racing driver Lopez lived. I found an article in the newspaper which said he was burned everywhere and that they were keeping him plugged in to all kinds of machinery while he slept on in a deep coma. But he lived. I kept thinking of the racing cars we had carved on our sticks in Rondua.
One afternoon, sitting by the window with Mae, I envisioned a figure in a bed wrapped like a mummy. The only sounds around it were the jitter and hum of life-support systems. It was death in life and I knew who it was and it made me shiver uncontrollably. I thought of Lopez's family; their present pain and impossible hopes for the future. Would he continue to live for years, always at the mercy of transparent tubes and yellow dials which marked smooth brain waves and a change in body temperature of one degree?
I thought of my husband Danny and tried to imagine how I would feel if he were Lopez and his life was being kept on only by imperceptible electric currents which entered his body every few seconds. Life was certainly precious, but death even more so in some cases. In the quietest whisper, I said, «Let him die.»
He died the next morning.
5
Eliot Kilbertus and I became great pals because we kept bumping into each other in the basement laundry room. One look at him told you he was as gay as Dick's hatband. He'd often arch his left eyebrow up into his scalp and his hands did little fan dances when he spoke to you – but oh, how he spoke!
«I have been _spying_ on you and your husband ever since you moved in, you know. You're Cullen James, right? I'm Eliot Kilbertus. Actually, my real name is Clayton _Drury_, but I changed it when I was seven. I mean, Drury-Dreary, right? I refuse to go through my life sounding like a Dickens character. Where did you get that sweater?»
«Bloomingdale's.»
«I thought so. You should buy only Italians, honey. They _last_.»
«Could you move over a little, Eliot? I can't see my dryer.»
That first day we talked, he was so «on» that I thought he was trying out for a part in some show and had mistaken me for the casting director. He didn't stop for a minute and his monologue ranged from the genius of Italian designers to his pug dog, Zampano, who was at the time suffering from the flu.
«Of course dogs get flu, Cullen. Are you mad? Imagine walking down the sidewalks of New York in bare feet. What you'd pick up! AIDS galore. Plague Paradise, _kinder_. Would you like to come up to my apartment after we're done here? I've only got one more rinse. Your daughter is extremely quiet, Cullen. Is she dead?»
His place was campy and fun. He wrote film reviews for one of the gay New York newspapers and his walls were covered with posters of terrible films like _Attack of the Killer Tomatoes_ and _Senior Prom_.
He made delicious cappucino in one of those ornate silver Gaggia machines I'd seen so often in the expresso bars in Italy. Then he picked up one of his dog's squeaky toys and after giving it a thorough washing in the sink, held it over Mae's traveling bed and squeezed it until she started to cry.
«Well, I mean, what do you want, honey? I'm not Captain Kangaroo!»
«I think she hates that, Eliot. But thanks for trying.»
He calmed down over the course of the afternoon and was speaking normally by the time I looked at my watch and realized how late it was. We made a date for lunch together the next day and I went home feeling good.
Danny liked him too. The first time Eliot came over for dinner, he was surprisingly shy and on his best behavior. For a while. Once he saw how nice and unjudgmental my husband was, he fired right up again and had us giggling all through the spinach lasagne.
«Oh Cullen, you really _are_ a vegetarian! I just thought you were slim. But you must give Mae meat, though; I'm totally serious about that. My friend Roger Waterman was brought up vegetarian and he turned into an accountant!»
In between the exclamation points and cunning remarks, Eliot Kilbertus was a considerate, overly generous man. He worked at home most of the time and would often call up and ask if I would like him to baby-sit for a while so that I could go out and do things. Sometimes I took him up on the offer because it was genuine and not an «I'll do you a favor _IF_ you'll do me one» sort of thing. He liked us and we liked him and we began spending more and more time together.
When we got to know each other better, he admitted he was wealthy because he was an only child and his parents had been in Florida real estate before they died. They had left him «great skads» of money which he had invested carefully and successfully. Every time he came to dinner he brought some kind of extravagant wine or bread or pate that didn't have anything to do with what I was serving but tasted good anyhow.
He always dressed in beautiful clothes, which he bought on semi-annual trips to Europe where he «went mad buying and eating and doing.» When he heard that we had lived for a year in Italy, he shook his head and told us we were retarded to have ever moved back to the United States of McDonald's. When Danny asked Eliot why _he_ didn't live over there, he shrugged and said he couldn't read Italian movie magazines and none of the drug stores sold dental floss.