Skeleton, Ray Bradbury

Skeleton

IT was past time for him to see the doctor again. Mr. Harris turned palely in at the stairwell, and on his way up the flight he saw Dr. Burleigh’s name gilded over a pointing arrow.

Would Dr. Burleigh sigh when he walked in? After all, this would make the tenth trip so far this year. But Burleigh shouldn’t complain; after all, he was paid for the examinations!

The nurse looked Mr. Harris over and smiled, a bit amusedly, as she tiptoed to the glazed glass door, opened it, and put her head in.

Harris thought he heard her say, ‘Guess who’s here, Doctor?’ And didn’t the doctor’s acid voice reply, faintly, ‘Oh, my God, again?’ Harris swallowed uneasily.

When Harris walked in, Dr. Burleigh snorted thinly. ‘Aches in your bones again! Ah!!’ He scowled at Harris and adjusted his glasses. ‘My dear Harris, you’ve been curried with the finest tooth combs and bacteria-brushes known to science.

You’re only nervous. Let’s see your fingers. Too many cigarettes. Let me smell your breath. Too much protein. Let’s see your eyes. Not enough sleep. My response? Go to bed, stop the protein, no smoking. Ten dollars, please.’

Harris stood there, sulking.
The doctor glanced up from his papers. ‘You still here? You’re a hypochondriac! That’s eleven dollars, now.’
‘But why should my bones ache?’ asked Harris.

Dr. Burleigh addressed him like a child. ‘You ever had a sore muscle, and kept at it, irritating it, fussing with it, rubbing it? It gets worse, the more you bother it. Then you leave it alone and the pain vanishes.

You realize you caused most of the soreness, yourself. Well, son, that’s what’s with you. Leave yourself alone. Take a dose of salts. Get out of here and take that trip to Phoenix you’ve stewed about for months. Do you good to travel!’

Five minutes later, Mr. Harris riffled through a classified phone directory at the corner druggist’s. A fine lot of sympathy one got from blind fools like Burleigh! He passed his finger down a list of BONE SPECIALISTS, found one named M. Munigant. Munigant lacked an M.D., or any other academical lettering behind his name, but his office was conveniently near. Three blocks down, one block over. . .

M. Munigant, like his office, was small and dark. Like his office, he smelled of iodoform, iodine, and other odd things. He was a good listener, though, and listened with eager, shiny moves of his eyes, and when he talked to Harris, he had an accent and seemed to whistle every word, undoubtedly due to imperfect dentures. Harris told all.

M. Munigant nodded. He had seen cases like this before. The bones of the body. Man was not aware of his bones. Ah, yes, the bones. The skeleton. Most difficult. Something concerning an imbalance, an unsympathetic co-ordination between soul, flesh and bone. Very complicated, softly whistled M. Munigant. Harris listened, fascinated.

Now, here was a doctor who understood his illness! Psychological, said M. Munigant. He moved swiftly, delicately to a dingy wall and rattled down half a dozen X-rays and paintings of the human skeleton. He pointed at these. Mr. Harris must become aware of his problem, yes. He pointed at this and that bone, and these and those, and some others.

The pictures were quite awful. They had something of the grotesquerie and off-bounds horror of a Dali painting. Harris shivered.
M. Munigant talked on. Did Mr. Harris desire treatment for his bones?

‘That all depends,’ said Harris.
M. Munigant could not help Harris unless Harris was in the proper mood. Psychologically, one had to need help, or the doctor was of no use. But (shrugging) Mr. Munigant would ‘try.’
Harris lay on a table with his mouth open. The lights were switched off, the shades drawn. M. Munigant approached his patient.

Something touched Harris’s tongue.
He felt his jawbones forced out. They cracked and made noises. One of those pictures on the dim wall seemed to leap. A violent shivering went through Harris and, involuntarily, his mouth snapped shut.

M. Munigant cried out. He had almost had his nose bitten off! It was no use. Now was not the time. M. Munigant raised the shades. He looked dreadfully disappointed. When Mr. Harris felt he could co-operate psychologically, when Mr. Harris really needed help and trusted M. Munigant to help him, then maybe something could be done. M. Munigant held out his little hand. In the meantime, the fee was only two dollars. Mr. Harris must begin to think. Here was a sketch for Mr. Harris to take home and study.

It would acquaint him with his body. He must be aware of himself. He must be careful. Skeletons were strange, unwieldy things. M. Munigant’s eyes glittered. Good day to Mr. Harris. Oh, and would he have a breadstick? He proffered a jar of long hard salty breadsticks to Harris, taking one himself to chew on, and saying that chewing breadsticks kept him in — ah — practice. See you soon, Mr. Harris. Mr. Harris went home.

The next day was Sunday. Mr. Harris started the morning by feeling all sorts of new aches and pains in his body. He spent some time glancing at the funny papers and then looking with new interest at the little painting, anatomically perfect, of a skeleton M. Munigant had given him.

His wife, Clarisse, startled him at dinner when she cracked her exquisitely thin knuckles, one by one, until he clapped his hands to his ears and cried, ‘Don’t do that!’

The remainder of the day he quarantined himself in his room. Clarisse was seated at bridge in the living-room with three other ladies, laughing and conversing. Harris himself spent his time fingering and weighing the limbs of his body with growing curiosity. After an hour of this he suddenly stood up and called: ‘Clarisse!’

She had a way of dancing into any room, her body doing all sorts of soft, agreeable things to keep her feet from ever quite touching the nap of a rug. She excused herself from her friends and came to see him now, brightly. She found him re-seated in a far corner and she saw that he was staring at that anatomical sketch. ‘Are you still brooding, darling?’ she asked. ‘Please don’t.’ She sat upon his knees.

Her beauty could not distract him now in his absorption. He juggled her lightness, he touched her knee-cap, suspiciously. It seemed to move under her pale, glowing skin. ‘Is it supposed to do that?’ he asked, sucking in his breath.

‘Is what supposed to do what?’ she laughed. ‘You mean my knee-cap?’
‘Is it supposed to run around on top your knee that way?’

She experimented. ‘So it does,’ she marvelled. ‘Well, now, so it does. Icky.’ She pondered. ‘No. On the other hand — it doesn’t. It’s only an optical illusion. I think. The skin moves over the bone; not vice-versa. See?’ she demonstrated.

‘I’m glad yours slithers, too,’ he sighed. ‘I was beginning to worry.’
‘About what?’
He patted his ribs. ‘My ribs don’t go all the way down, they stop here. And I found some confounded ones that dangle in mid-air!’
Beneath the curve of her small breasts, Clarisse clasped her hands.

‘Of course, silly, everybody’s ribs stop at a given point. And those funny little short ones are floating ribs.’
‘I just hope they don’t float around too much,’ he said, making an uneasy joke. Now, he desired that his wife leave him, he had some important discovering to do with his own body and he didn’t want her laughing at him.

‘I’ll feel all right,’ he said. ‘Thanks for coming in, dear.’
‘Any time,’ she said, kissing him, rubbing her small pink nose warm against his.
‘I’ll be damned!’ He touched his nose with his fingers, then hers. ‘Did you ever realize that the nose bone only comes down so far and a lot of gristly tissue takes up from there on?’
She wrinkled hers. ‘So what?’ And, dancing, she exited.

He felt the sweat rise from the pools and hollows of his face, forming a salten tide to flow down his cheeks. Next on the agenda was his spinal cord and column. He examined it in the same manner as he operated the numerous push-buttons in his office, pushing them to summon the messenger boys.

But, in these pushings of his spinal column, fears and terrors answered, rushed from a million doors in Mr. Harris’s mind to confront and shake him. His spine felt awfully — bony. Like a fish, freshly eaten and skeletonized, on a china platter. He fingered the little rounded knobbins. ‘My God.’

His teeth began to chatter. ‘God All-Mighty,’ he thought, ‘why haven’t I realized it all these years? All these years I’ve gone around with a — SKELETON — inside me!’ He saw his fingers blur before him, like motion films triply speeded in their quaking apprehension. ‘How is it that we take ourselves so much for granted? How is it we never question our bodies and our being?’

A skeleton. One of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake-fingered, rattling things that sway from neck-chains in abandoned webbed closets, one of those things found on the desert all long and scattered like dice!

He stood upright, because he could not bear to remain seated. Inside me now, he grasped his stomach, his head, inside my head is a — skull. One of those curved carapaces which holds my brain like an electrical jelly, one of those cracked shells with the holes in front like two holes shot through it by a double-barrelled shot-gun! With its grottoes and caverns of bone, its revetments and placements for my flesh, my smelling,