A mysterious character once lived on a mountain by the sea. Those who visited him claimed that he was kind. At times he seemed ancient like an old grandfather; at other times as young and strong as an adolescent. The mysterious character could fish, set bones, build boats and read. He especially loved teaching children to read. When the town coroner heard this, he suspected danger. A plague was imminent. The coroner and the gendarmes arrested the mysterious man, and began the interrogation. What is your name? they asked. When he told him, they said that others had the same name; he must be lying. They gave him anasthetic and removed one lung, one kidney, his spleen, and some of his intestines, all of which they put in jars. After he awakened from his coma, they showed him the kidney in the jar. It was too worn out. Then they showed him the lung. It was too fresh and new. The intestines looked more like eels or gigantic tapeworms than guts. They lined the jars up on a table in front of him. The sight of his glassed innards made him sad. Then they showed him his inked dactylographs and pointed out the imperfections and secret codes embedded in them. In his stomach they had found some silver coins and old nails—these were also in jars, and labeled highly suspicious. Clearly the man was not only an impostor, but also a robotic monster crafted from old and new corpses, machinery, and even strange creatures. He had been sent to deceive with heaven only knew what manner of wizardry. They decided to cut off his hands and feet while he was still awake. Who are you? the coroner demanded as he sawed into a wrist. Mercy! the man sighed. I am whole, and I am true.
anatomy
The Backbone
A calligrapher sat in his library, staring at a blank sheet of paper, an inkstone, and a brush, for he wished to compose a love letter to a girl who loved him, whom he loved dearly. For some time, he had delayed inconfessing this love, and she had been more than patient. This morning, as spring rain fell beyond the sliding doors to the garden, he decided he must make a decision and confess. To confess he needed backbone. Even eels, as unstable as they seem, have backbones. The man dipped the brush into the ink and drew a mouth in the shape of a box, a downward curving line below it, and then another mouth in the shape of a box. There before him glistened the character for backbone. It was perfect in form. When it had dried, he put it into a wooden cylinder for carrying scrolls, and made his way to her home. It was autumn there, and she was raking orange leaves, her long hair blown awry now and then by little gusts of cold wind. She was thinking to herself how the wind was like a river ten thousand leagues long, but surprised by his sudden appearance, she dropped the rake. The man approached her, embraced her and kissed her, saying, The backbone is a journey from mouth to mouth. He unrolled the scroll. They gazed at it together as orange leaves rained from above. And then they kissed again. The girl stopped kissing him and looked at the scroll once more. I will not marry you, she said abruptly, nor be your lover. A calligrapher should know that what look to be mouths in this character are the stylized forms of vertebrae in the original ideograph. The backbone is not a journey. It is a sequence of vertebrae. And even if these boxes did signify two orifices, what evil designs and intentions do they signify? The moment is ruined for me for all of eternity. I cannot be with you. And I do not like eels.
The Bonesetter
The bonesetter worked in a shop not far from the radiant blue sea. The shop consisted of four rectangular chambers surrounding a courtyard lined with porticos and a pluvium at its center. The walls bore mosaics of animal and human skeletons in pale blue paint and square spirals at the tops and bottoms. The bonesetter had painted them himself. One chamber was dedicated to receiving visitors, the second to display various skeletons he had collected, the third to healing, and the fourth to his library and sleeping quarters. Whenever his assistants posed questions, he would remind them to read the bones first. In the evenings, the bonesetter sat down with his wife to a simple meal of bread, wine, and other things. They were happy, and the people loved them for the healing they brought. One day, a great earthquake killed his wife, destroyed his shop, burned his books, and crushed his collection of skeletons into rubble and dust. Most of the island and its towns lay in ruins. The bonesetter managed to dig up his savings and collect whatever else he had deposited at a local shrine. With a handful of other refugees, the bonesetter embarked on a longship for other islands and lands. He came to a small city on a remote shore. The politarchs, pleased that a healer and philosopher had come to their distant land, invited him to lecture in their court on the acropolis. When the bonesetter began to speak of anatomy, bone structures, and skeletons, the court laughed. They did not believe in bones. Confused, the bonesetter asked them to explain. Bones were just the fossils of old medicine, they said. Nobody believed in them anymore. The bonesetter suggested that they feel their own skulls, bodies and limbs. They instructed him that while indeed there were hardened portions of flesh in their bodies, these were not to be consideres bones. The bonesetter requested that a cadaver be brought. No cadavers were available, since the barbarians threw all dead bodies, weighted with stones, into the sea. The bonesetter asked that a convicted assassin, adulteress, or traitor be brought forward. They brought one who fit all three requirements. The bonesetter asked which arm she had used to strike down her victim. The right, she replied. Then bonesetter severed her left arm, and proceeded to strip it, cut it open and to reveal the humerus, radius, ulna, carpus and phalanges as the poor adulteress bled out on the ground. Straightaway, the court condemned him as a heretic, magician, and murderer. They chained him to the dead woman, weighted them with stones, and threw their bodies into the sea. One headsman secretly said to another that one day the sea would give up all of its dead and their skeletons. The other remarked that in the meantime the dead would have someone to set their bones.
The Anatomist
After the autopsy, the coroner taught the young anatomist how to read the dead, and handed him a pair of nondescript, round rimless spectacles of smoked, black glass, the type one would wear to view an eclipse. They both put on their smoked glasses and gazed upon the sewn-up corpse, pale blue in the light of the gas lamps. To read the dead was like looking into a kaleidoscope, and then into a codex or palimpsest seen through a stereoscopic slide viewer. After this, one passed through the perspectives and experiences of a cheiroscope, a microscope, a telescope, and then finally a starry heaven exploding into an infinity of word nebulae and galaxies. Breathless, the anatomist thanked the old coroner for the lesson. Do not read the living, the coroner warned, when they had removed their smoked glasses. Do not read the living. The young anatomist rode the subway home, bursting with excitement. On seeing a blind man board the train, he remembered his glasses. Forgetting or ignoring the warning, he put the glasses on and started to read the living. What he saw was a different sort of galaxy, full of cello and violin music, black holes, screams, dancing stars, retrograde films in monochrome and exploding eclipses in positive and negative monochrome—all bleeding through an endless typewriter ribbon filled with scripts. The young anatomist got off at the end of the line and started the long walk home, almost shaking with euphoria and curiosity. As he passed through a park of conspiring spruces, some subway passengers who had followed him ambushed him and beat him without mercy, robbed him and cursed and threatened him in inarticulate hisses before running off into the night. Not long after, the coroner arrived, helped him to his feet, and gave him a new pair of smoked glasses to replace the broken pair. They smoked a cigarette in the darkness of the evergreens. The coroner shook his head and whispered both severely and gently. They do not like to be read.
the lost way 