One Story

Pascal and the Bonesetters

Her teacher lives in a stately two-story house on a street sheltered by trees. It has a sidewalk-level gate and stone steps that lead up through a garden. A weathered birdbath, a stone tablet incised with biblical verse. A flimsy, wire-footed sign expressing solidarity with certain groups, with science generally. (Occasionally, she wonders who they are, these implied opponents.) Over the door, there is a radial section of glass that is pebbled to opacity and gilt with its address: 728.

            Inside, she steps out of her shoes to leave them on cooled tile. She pads down a long hallway of deep carpet, past antique needlepoints framed behind glass. One is of a smiling boy in breeches and a tunic. He looks British, or perhaps French, his expression of mirth palled by the murky glass. At the end of the corridor there’s an abrupt geometry of light, thrown there by the sitting room’s bay windows.

            Magda sits in her armchair, her slight legs crossed slackly, her pale hands clutching a newspaper. She looks up when Rosemary enters and smiles, her face comprehensively wrinkled.

            “Hello Rose.”

            “Hey Magda.”

            The light astonishes Magda’s pale skin where it falls and gives her eyes a glassy quality.

            “How was school today?”

            “Fine.” She considers for a moment. “We had a test in chemistry, on stoichiometry.”

            Magda nods vaguely.

            “Charles is in a bit of a mood today.”

            Magda will say this sometimes. There is a warm pastry smell that reminds Rose of childhood.

            “Politics has him riled up. The election. I tell him not to start his day like that.”

            “Ah.”

            “Don’t let him take it out on you, dear.”

            “I won’t.…”

            “It’s your dollar after all.”

            Magda laughs, and so does Rose, mainly because Magda did. There are bookshelves full of books and topped with free-standing photos of grandchildren. She gives Rose a parting smile and then resumes her attention on the newspaper. Rose continues to the door of the study where they meet. She knocks and Charles says Yes? and she enters.

            Charles sits in one of two folding chairs. A wooden music stand is set up between himself and the empty chair, and his horn is upright on a stand that slots vertically up the bell. He wears reading glasses and is making notations in pencil on a piece of sheet music. He doesn’t look up.

            “Good day?”

            “Uh huh, yeah.”

            “Good…”

            Charles wears khakis and a white polo, and on his right hand is a mysterious patch of gauze. He keeps writing, so she gets ready. She opens her case to reveal a trumpet: a cool silver, its brilliant complexion marred here and there by natural-oil smudges, an insignificant ding in the bell. It rests in a lush purple fur, and when she removes it it leaves a curious fossil impression.

            Together, they warm up with only their mouthpieces, sounding a little like two Daffy Ducks. Then they do long-tones with their instruments, the tones not quite commensurate, hers less sure and full. Today, they are meant to work on what she will perform at the year-end festival, a difficult piece from the back of Arban’s methods book. The section in question is towards the end of the piece, a variation on the main melody that requires triple-tonguing and difficult intervals. 

            Charles holds his horn at ease so the bell’s mouth fits his knee. He indicates a passage with his off-hand.

            “So it still just uses the two consonants: ta and ka.” 

            “Like double tonguing.”

            “Right, but so here it’s: ta ta ka. Ta ta ka.”

            Charles’s index finger, now held aloft, goes low low high in the air, a visual approximation. She nods, looks at the sheet music, and then plays a measure slowly.

            “Exactly. But when you get that up to tempo it won’t sound so discrete.”

            “Right.”

            “So…”

            He puts his horn to his lips and plays the single triplet pattern slowly first, then again and again, increasing the tempo with each repetition. Eventually, it is as though there are two voices: one horn playing the ground notes, and another elusive and flighty horn that chimes in only to play every third. 

            “Mmm, yeah.”

            “You see?”

            “Yes.”

            Before they finish for the day, they do range exercises, gradually extending scales up to her highest note, and then trying to best it. She manages a strained, unsure E flat above high C. Charles nods, emptying his spit valve into the carpet.

            “That’s enough for today.”

            She packs up her horn. Charles is still seated, again marking up a piece of sheet music. 

            “Oh. I was going to ask you something.”

            She looks over.

            “We need a second trumpet to fill in at church in two weeks.” He circles a tempo directive in pencil. “The weekend after next. Brian won’t be in town for Easter service. I was hoping you might be able to do it. It’s dreadfully easy, the music. And there’ll be free food after.”

            “Oh, yeah, I can do that.”

            “Great, thank you. I’ll see you next week then. We can look at the material then too.” 

            Magda gives her a small bag of baked goods on her way out, little tarts with a gash of red berry in their middles. They are already fogging up the ziplock. 

            Her home is only a few blocks away, so she walks. The air is humid and close, and she can feel her own face as a kind of presence. Everything feels slightly awkward and intense and dissociated. Because she was so caught up in the lesson, it occurs to her. Gradually, as she walks, all the other aspects of her life—her family, her friends, the Algebra II homework due tomorrow, the jog she’ll go for after dinner—come back to clutter and normalize a mental landscape that had, without her entirely realizing it, become kind of abstract. 

            She passes a home with a sectioned ladder leaned up against its gutters. There are men on the roof hammering, a radio playing loudly. One says something, and the others laugh. Politics has him riled up. The election. There is an unpleasantness to this phrase, somehow like the patch of gauze on her teacher’s hand. And then there’s a slight breeze against her face, and it’s less humid, and it feels really nice to be walking. She feels light. Every now and then, she finds she is still privately articulating the triple-tongue pattern, so softly it’s almost nothing at all: Ta ta ka.

*

            She likes to run at night. She puts on high-cut shorts and a shirt worn soft. Colorful, ergonomic shoes and a bracelet that keeps track of certain biometrics. When she finally leaves her home she enters a world of dark vagaries. Street lamps cast lurid orange vales of light and the old, hunched women walking their dogs are like harmless gargoyles. She runs through parks made strange by new patterns of shadow, by homes where families are eating or watching television, sometimes framed by big, disclosing windows.

            Tonight, her route takes her past a big church, one that has a sign declaring itself a “lodge.” From its big, wooden doors, men are spilling out into the dark. Some lounge by the immediate lightpost. One says to another that that’s the thing about Democratic Socialism. She’s reminded of a book by Steinbeck they read in class last fall, where at the end a man was shot down in an apple grove. Her teacher quoted Steinbeck as saying the book was about more than political organizing, that it was about man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself.

            When she gets back she showers, then gets ready to FaceTime with Molly. She inspects herself in the camera’s feed as she waits for the call to connect. She wears a too-big sweatshirt that swallows her hands. It is her brother’s and has “MIDDLEBURY” printed across the breast. She has her damp hair pinned up in a top knot.

            After an hour or so, it gets to where they’re basically talked out but haven’t closed the stream. Molly’s eyes are ignoring the webcam, attending to her screen. She squints to read something and then smiles.

            “Molly.”

            Molly’s pixels shift about responsively.

            “Mmmm…?”

            “What are you doing?”

            “Just…,” Molly clicks on something, her mouth slightly open. “Stalking this girl I sometimes stalk.”

            “Okay.”

            Molly doesn’t elaborate, so with a certain effort Rose asks.

            “Who?”

            “It’s this model I follow. She went to our school actually. She was, like, two years above us, I think?”

            “Uh huh.”

            “And now she’s a fitness influencer. Like, okay, here…”

            Molly clicks a few times, and then there is a sing-song pinging, a blued hyperlink appearing in the video chat’s embedded messenger box. Rose clicks it and is redirected through her browser to the woman’s Instagram profile. There are photos of the woman in very short shorts and what looks like just a bra, standing in front of a gym’s wall-mirror, a jungle of platinum-sheeny machinery behind her.

            “She’s very…orange.”

            “Yeah.” Molly laughs. “She looks sort of more normal in her off-season photos.”

            “Mmmm.”

            Molly doesn’t say anything for a moment or so. Then she leans back and her expression is one of someone coming out of a low-level trance.

            “Yeah. It’s nuts. She’s basically our age, and she just bought this huge house in San Francisco.”

            “Mmmm.”

            Molly bites at her lip, then her eyes move to the upper-right of her monitor.

            “Anyway…I should go. We have that test tomorrow in Algebra, right?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Yeah. I’d better go, uh, ‘study’ for that.”

            Molly throws a laggy peace sign to the webcam, and then it cuts out. 

            Rose gets up and goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She scrutinizes her face. She is a little flush and ruddy around the mouth—a few discrete points of red—but otherwise fine. She contrives a smile, lets it resolve, then smiles again. She imagines taking a video of herself, then posting it. She replaces her toothbrush in its cup and turns off the light.

            Later, ensconced in bed with the laptop balanced on her stomach, Rose navigates back to the fitness model’s page, then follows another link to her YouTube channel. She watches a video where she, Gabbi, describes her “morning routine,” her movements from room to room captured from various static angles. She relays in a calm, softly close voiceover what time she gets up, her preferred moisturizers, a recipe for a protein shake. The skincare company seems to be a sponsor; in the video’s description there is an all-caps phrase to be used for a fifteen percent discount “at checkout.” There are a lot of videos, some with fairly provocative thumbnails: montages of workout sessions, day-in-the-life vlogs. There is one video where Gabbi speaks credulously and at length—thirty-two minutes and thirteen seconds—on the subject of her mental health. Lastly, Rose watches part of a video tour of the woman's Bay Area home. The camera takes the viewer all around the house and then through sliding glass doors to the outside. There is an overwhelming flash of white and then the frame auto-adjusts to realize the full scope of a California vista, a hilly, moneyed declension.

*

            The roller blinds are pulled down against the afternoon, the classroom made unnaturally dark. A screen drapes against the chalkboard, the current slide of a powerpoint showing the three branches of the government. Off to the side, Mr. Hoffmann’s form keeps pulling away at the cling of a synthetic polo with little plucks. He generally teaches health class and coaches football, but was called in after Mrs. Ackerman had a “family crisis” and has now been covering for her for a few weeks. Occasionally, the display cuts out and he has to finesse the HDMI cable.

            Rose braces her feet against the metal legs of the desk in front of her, bearing gently into the unnatural angle and sending pins and needles up her calves. On the desk before her is a stapled handout, the powerpoint presentation reduced to three slides a page. There are lines beside each miniature slide for note-taking, but no real reason to take notes, because the quizzes are just whatever’s on the slides. Her right hand rests lightly on the foremost edge of the desk. With the pads of her fingers, she half-consciously proceeds through phantom scales: D# Major, then minor, then harmonic minor, etc. There is the subdued buzz of a cellphone in a pocket or backpack. Her fingers iterate, thoughtlessly almost.

            When she gets home her brother’s old Subaru is parked in the driveway. It looks full, bags and packs and rigging all pressing up against the windows. They aren’t expecting him, and it’s a Thursday, so he should be working. It occurs to her that perhaps something bad has happened, but she can’t quite reconcile that with all the junk in his car, the rigging. She can feel the sun on the back of her neck as she thinks about how it doesn’t really make sense, whatever she’s concluding: it’s not like he would have cleaned his car if something bad had happened.

            She heads upstairs. There is a thin line of light beneath the door at the end of the hallway. She walks past her mother’s study, past the bathroom, and knocks. From inside comes a Yeah? and she enters. The room is unchanged—still half storage space, half his old room—except Lucas is in there now, at his desk with his back to her. 

            He slowly turns in his desk chair, coming to face her with one long eyebrow cocked. He wears cut-off shorts and a white shirt advertising a climbing festival, a prominent hole just above the nipple displaying bronzed skin. His curly hair is all mussed up from raking it back the way he does, and there are the dark beginnings of a mustache above his smirk.

            “I should have known it was you. Come to unsettle my repose.”

            She just looks at him, feeling a little awkward there in the doorframe. She’s never quick enough for his banter. In the familial hierarchy, she is the behaved, studious, quiet one—an assignation she accepts not completely unreflectively, but nonetheless in a behaved, studious, quiet way. She thinks of witty things to say comfortably after the fact, which Lucas once explained to her is what the French call l’esprit d’escalier.

            “When’d you get here?”

            He leans back with the chair, spreading his knees and loosely swaying in place. “Couple hours ago. I hit up Louise on my way down. Don’t think she was very stoked to see me but…”

            He trails off. 

            “And how long are you here for?”

            “A few days. Then I’ll pack up and be on my way.”

            “Your car looks full.”

            “Yeah…”

            “Back to New York?”

            “No…”

            “Are you traveling again? For work?”

            Her brother adjusts into a slightly more upright position, his brows furrowed, his eyes cartoonishly searching the room’s nooks and crannies.

            “Is Mom in here? I could swear I…”

            Rose stares again. He laughs softly and drops the bit, reaching behind himself to take a milky-white Nalgene from the desk. He takes a long drink and then adopts a flat affect.

            “Alright, you win. I sort of quit that job. And New York generally, for a little while at least.”

            “Oh.”

            “Yeah…,” He replaces the dangling lid and with excess deliberation screws it back on.

            “Where are you going then?”

            “Out west, for a bit. To visit some friends.”

            “Climbing?”

            “Uh huh.”

            Above her, over the mantle of the door, there is a climber’s pull-up block bolted in place, a lumpy, chalk-paled, purple and green shelf with various holds and knobs and cavities for strength and grip and conditioning exercises. There is a large computer monitor on the desk behind him, displaying an email client with flashing chat boxes.

            “Is that…good? Quitting?”

            “I mean, I wouldn’t say good.” He cocks his head to one side and then the other, equivocally. “Mom’ll have a fit, that’s for sure.”

            “Mom doesn’t really have fits though.”

            “I mean, she’ll have her equivalent of a fit. Which is worse. Though, to be fair, I have sort of been hinting I’d do something like this.” He pinches absently at his lower lip, pausing. “It’s good, I guess, for me, in the sense that…like, I’m not feeling like I want to blow my head off at the moment. Which I have been.”

            “Right.”

            Lucas gets up and stretches tall. He walks over to a bookshelf filled with his college texts. He runs a finger along them, then removes a small book with three bands of color across the cover. He opens to a page, leafs through further, stops, and then chuckles:

            “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer!”

            He closes the book and looks over at her.

            “Apropos, huh?” He asks.

            He rotates the book in his hands like it is any sort of object.

            “I don’t think Mom would approve.” 

            He laughs.

            “No…probably not what she advises her clients.”

            He replaces the book on the shelf, seems to inspect its neighbor’s spine.

            “How’s school then?”

            “Good.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Yeah. We took the PSATs recently, so we’ll be hearing back about that soon.”

            “Mmmm. Fascinating.”

            He cants a book half out with one finger, then lets it fall back into place.

            “You think I should drop out and head West?” She asks the back of his head.

            “Touché.…” 

            He nods slowly, as if corroborating a private thought, then sits back down in the desk chair. He slumps down and loosely swivels. She waits, thinking about what her mother would say if she were here. She is always pressuring Lucas to be more practical, to think about his 401K and to not date certain unserious types. One thing she likes is how her mother’s criticisms sort of bounce off her brother. She watches as he rakes his hair up and maintains his hand indeterminately in the air after. He looks over at her then, his travel-oily hair slowly resolving down.

            “You want to go for a walk or something?”

            Out the window, the light is bright. An excessive, after-school brightness.

            “Yeah, sure.”

*

            They’re idling at a red light, her brother’s black sunglasses giving him an adult aspect. He points at a building, a new apartment complex in a state of partial finish.

            “Is that new?”

            “Yeah, I think so.”

            “Huh…it’s horrible….”

            They park in a big dirt lot and then take the long bowed bridge over the river and towards the small island. The bridge casts a long, forensic shadow over the overexposed waters. She can’t really tell where Lucas is looking behind his glasses.

            “What’s that thing your teacher always says?”

            “Uh…”

            “About practice. One of his mottos.”

            A man jogs past, a Rorschach of sweat realizing itself on his shirt-back.

            “Oh… Practice doesn’t make perfect: perfect practice makes perfect.”

            “Yeah.” Her brother nods slowly. “I think that’s sort of how I’ve been feeling at work. The idea is that you can work hard for no reason, right?”

            She considers. Her teacher tells her this regarding certain best practices: maintaining a correct embouchure, taking full breaths deep into the diaphragm, not using too much pressure to hit high notes. His point is that one should avoid bad habits, so as not to reinforce them. She takes a stranded lock of hair back behind her right ear.

            “Yeah, I think so. He tells me that mostly so I don’t pick up bad habits, and then keep doing them.”

            “Oh, right…” They walk a few moments in silence. “I think what it was, at work, was that I realized I was practicing to get good at something—sort of—that I didn’t want to do. And the concept of doing it for five, ten more years suddenly became terrifying.”

            “Uh huh.”

            They reach the other side and take a concrete switchback down. This island was some kind of penal colony during the Civil War, and there are now scattered plaques set in the earth, displays with diagrams and embossed text. There is a diffuse sense that bad things happened here, once upon a time, but it’s almost inappreciable in the sun, the heat. A couple in athleisure are standing in the middle of the path talking about something, the man referring to his phone. They begin to walk the perimeter.

            “So you saw Louise then?”

            “Yeah. I just stayed one night though.”

            Louise is the oldest. When she calls home it’s about homeownership or fiscal things. Rose just hears her mom’s side of the conversation, things like: Well, have you talked to your financial advisor about it? Louise and Lucas butt heads a lot, while, to Rose, Louise is nice but sort of abstracted. She is tall and very pretty and dresses well, in creamy sweaters and dark jeans and caramel-colored boots. Her laughter sounds kind of fake, like it’s pre-recorded, and she has a long term boyfriend, Robert.

            “Was Robert there?”

            “Yeah. He’s on that work-from-home grind, I think. He’s doing UI design for some firm now. So less art.… Louise left super early for the lab, and Robert sort of disappeared into his study. So I just split.”

            “You could do something like that, couldn’t you?”

            “Design? Yeah, I guess I could.” A beat. “Mom.”

            He kicks a rock, and it rolls, skips, and then pops high at the end.

            “I just meant —“

            “Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s not a bad idea. I mean, I did a little bit of design stuff for school, for that magazine…AI though.…” 

            Her brother reaches into his pocket, apprehending and then jingling his keys. He appears to consider something in a non-committal way. The sun is just above the horizon now, the day nearly spent, objects throwing long shadows.

            “Anyways…how’s the trumpet?”

            “Good, mostly. I’m working with Charles on my festival piece.”

            “Ah. You’re gonna kill it.”

            “Maybe. I mean, you know how I get.”

            “The nerves?”

            “Yeah.”

            Lucas rubs his septum between thumb and forefinger.

            “I think the thing is…you gotta just realize it’s nothing. The nerves, I mean.”

            “That’s easy for you to say.”

            “Right, well, yeah, fair enough. I guess it’s true I’ve never really had a problem with public speaking or stuff like that.”

            “I mean, I can give presentations just fine.”

            “Oh yeah? Huh…”

            “It’s just with the trumpet. I start shaking. It messes up the high notes, or, like, you can just tell that my tone is off and it doesn’t sound good.” 

            “Hmmm.” 

            “It’s frustrating.…”

            “You know Mom used to use beta blockers, for when she had to do those big conferences?“

            “‘Beta blockers’?”

            “Yeah. They’re these pills that calm your nerves. She swore by them.”

            “Oh.” There was something uncanny about her mother taking a pill like that. Almost like a drug. “I don’t know if those are allowed.”

            “Yeah. They’re probably considered PEDs,” Lucas laughs.

            They follow a short concrete walkway overhung with foliage and then take an embedded metal ladder down onto pale, lunar rocks. There is graffiti on some of them, a big oblong mushroom, faded now like a bad tattoo. An ill-proportioned pentagram, a phone number. They meander across the rocks in the falling light. Her leg muscles feel loose and capable and she takes a private, childish pleasure in scampering from rock to rock. Way off is a single, high-rise apartment that stands out arbitrarily against a horizon of trees. It’s surreal, like a still image from a dystopian film. 

            They reach an area where things level out to a scattering of shallow pools. She crouches and upon closer inspection they reveal a stagnant aspect: full of muck and slowly turning dreck, nameless dusky elements drifting and dispersing. Lucas looks over at her, makes a conqueror’s claw of his right hand.

            “Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer!”

            “Easy for you to say.”

            He laughs and stretches. She straightens and they stand together in silence. Her brother coughs.

            “Yeah, I guess it is. It’s the same as me trying to explain what work is like to Mom, or to you. There’s something lost, right? Something inadequate about the communicative act of my saying that I hate my job and Mom saying that I need to think clearly and maturely about it.” He pauses, looking out at the horizon, “It’s meaningless, the relationship between those statements and actual life. I think about that sometimes, with her consulting work—like, how do you really even talk about these things, or how do you know you’re even on the same page with the person…?”

            She’s not sure she follows. She feels an intimacy though, in his voice, and a curious, warm feeling in her joints. Because it feels like he’s being serious about something and taking her seriously in turn. Then he smirks.

            “You ever seen that meme, about fucking off and starting a noise rock band when you don’t know what to do with your life?”

            She shakes her head.

            “Well, I thought of a good band name the other day: ‘Pascal and the Bonesetters.’”

            She just looks at him.

            “Want to know what it means?”

            “No. But you can tell me anyway.”

            “It’s Pascal as in Blaise Pascal, the theologian and mathematician. Apparently, one winter his dad fell and broke his hip, and two doctors came to the house to tend to him.”

            “Right.”

            “And they both turned out to be Jansenists, and all their talk ended up converting Blaise, setting him on his search.”

            “Huh.”

            “I don’t really know too much about Pascal. Just that phrase of his: The terrifying silence of infinite spaces frightens me.”

            “That could be your first album.”

            He laughs, “Now you’re thinking with your head.”

            She smiles. She likes being with Lucas, because it clarifies her mind in the way the trumpet practice does—but differently too, in a way that also sort of troubles her thought. It’s a strange, floaty feeling she gets thinking about who’s right, Lucas or her Mom, like she’s brushing up against the contours of something alien and significant. Her brother exhaustively pops the joints of one hand.

            “I guess stuff like that doesn’t really happen anymore.”

            “Mom fell last spring, and sprained her wrist kind of badly.”

            “Oh right.” His expression anticipates a punchline. “And pray tell, sister: on what matters did her bonesetters discourse?”

            “Well, she just went to Liberty, and then came home with a cast that they said she had to wear for six weeks. She said this weird guy with an IV drip sort of hit on her in the waiting room.”

            Her brother laughs then, deeply and honestly. Her right hand goes to her left tricep, the cooled, faintly goose-fleshed surface. They are cast now in glooming light, both their forms made murky and intimate. It feels like they too are dusky elements, swirling in some kind of medium. She takes a deep breath, down into her diaphragm, appreciating its expansion. She looks at her brother.

            “Guess we should head back, right?”

            “Yeah. probably should.”

            He smiles at her, his expression palled. Granular and vague and like a bad video feed in the almost no light.

∩

Philip Harris is an editor at the Cleveland Review of Books. He studies oil painting in NH, and sometimes writes. Convivial missives, press inquiries, or vitriol can be sent to harrisphilipe@gmail.com.