Bone Music

Abstract

Bone Music Evgeniya Dame (bio) On our first date he brought me home to show his collection of bone records. He stood on a chair, pulled box after box from the top of a dusty wardrobe, talking about the music and how they approached doctors for old, discarded x-rays and then cut grooves into them using homemade lathes. I sat on the bed and held a skin-thin black circle to the light. Its edges were uneven. Someone had trimmed the x-ray sheet with scissors to the shape and size of an old 78. On the remaining surface, two skeletal arms wrapped around an invisible song. all my loving the caption said in Russian. I asked who "they" were, and he shrugged. Bootleggers, music lovers. "Like you?" I kept pulling records from the box. The brown postal paper of handmade sleeves rustled under my fingers. A Gershwin tune in a shattered hip, Elvis in cracked ribs, "Rock Around the Clock" scratched into a ribcage. He said bones were made before his time. He put down a "Tutti Frutti" record—a spinal cord—and kissed me. "Certainly before yours," he said. He tasted like cigarettes and chocolate. "But why?" I said. His hands were under my shirt, sliding up and down my back. He paused and dug his thumbs hard into my waist. "Why what?" "Why cut music on a discarded x-ray when you have vinyl? Did they have vinyl?" "Sure, they did," he said. He pulled back and propped himself on one elbow. "Sure, Katya, they had vinyl. You could listen to a very good quality Lenin speech on vinyl." He winked at me. Not many people can wink. He made it look very natural. "Or you could listen to real music, on the bones, and it would crackle and hiss in your ear, and it would be the most beautiful sound in the world." Later, he got dressed and made me chicken soup. He watched the pot closely. When the fat from the chicken rose to the surface, he scooped it with a ladle to keep the broth clear. I'd never heard my boyfriend play the bone records, not until the night [End Page 78] his mother slashed his hand with a can opener. By then I had dropped out of college and moved to the apartment they shared. His mother was close to ninety, never far from trouble. She slipped on the bathroom floor, hid our things. When he wasn't home, she would shuffle to the front door and stand still for hours, watching the empty hallway through the peephole. "Alcoholics!" she called out. "I can hear you. I know you're there." She was tiny and strong, with a high, oily forehead miraculously free of wrinkles. That night, we left her alone after dinner while she finished her tea. We should not have left her alone. Food brought out the worst in her. She could not tell fresh from spoiled, cooked from raw. But she always drank her tea slowly, in the style of Russian merchants, and we got bored. She would pour a little into a saucer, balance it on the fingertips of one hand, and slurp, while looking around with that hungry look she got when the meal was over and she couldn't remember eating a single thing. While we made the bed and took the trash out, she found a bag of raw buckwheat and tore it open. When he found her sending handfuls into her mouth, he tried to take the bag away. She grabbed a can opener and cut him. She almost knocked me over in the apartment's narrow hallway, running for her bedroom, the bag still in her hands, the grains spilling to the floor like sad brown confetti. He looked defeated that night, spent a full hour playing Chuck Berry. I watched the record spin, dizzy and elated. This one was cut on an x-ray of a skull, the spindle hole like a bullet wound, dead center. The song drowned in static and crackle, its sound ghostly. "That's just not right," he kept saying. "Why would she do that?" He'd...