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stories are the bones of everything

short story

The crab boy of Kabul

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Leaving so I could arrive elsewhere, with a few illuminating details

In 2011, I left the United States for perhaps the 200th time in my life on a plane. I’ve come and gone and come and gone so many times I’ve lost count. This time, I was headed for Kabul. The capital city of war-torn Afghanistan. A place where (so they tell me) the dust in the air is 15% animal and human feces. Fun pseudo-fact. You are quite welcome to look it up and challenge my second-hand information.

Grammar is important in some places. Kabul, generally speaking, is not one of those places. I plan to write extensively about my time there (due to the ghosts that haunt my dreams). This story is about the crab boy of Kabul.

We, being NATO contractors paid ungodly amounts of money to pretend that we were making better officers out of Afghanistan’s national police force, lived in a “first-class hotel.” That, in and of itself, is another story. I intend to tell it too.

The camp was strategically positioned only 25 or so kilometers from our daily post at the Afghanistan National Police Training General Command, or ANPTGC for short. The place known as ANPTGC is, of and in itself, worth several of my fascinating anecdotes. Let’s set the scene for those of you who have not have the privilege of visiting or living in the city of Kabul:

Kabul smells like a mixture of burning things and offal

It is a maelstrom of chaotic activity. Situated at a relatively high elevation in a semi-arid climate and populated by about 3.5 million souls (give or take a few thousand a day), Kabul is 3,500 years old. And no smell has ever blown away from the city since it became one. Imagine a mixture of burning things, dead things, sweating things and shitting things. That will, perhaps, give you a 10% idea of the amount of nose crinkling I did during my time as a resident.

The streets are paved, sometimes. The motorcycles winding their way recklessly past donkeys, running children, roaming packs of mangy dogs, caravans of paranoid, egotistic, armed elites, and all other manners of roaming life careening wildly through what passes for avenues of transport are a cacophony of suicidal carelessness. The streets are not paved, sometimes. In less than two years I saw more than two dozen human traffic fatalities, an uncountable number of dead dogs, and one horse that dropped dead in the middle of what passes for a road in that particular place.

I’m coming around to the crab boy. Bear with me.

There are no traffic lights in Kabul. Only roundabouts. Some routes are two lanes. Some are twelve. The veins and arteries converge without warning. When there is a traffic jam on one side, drivers immediately begin to use the opposing lanes in a fashion that, if employed in the West, would result in dozens of fatalities per mile of road (do you like how I switched units of measurement?). That doesn’t happen in Kabul.

There are accidents, to be sure. But the beggars that sit in between lanes, combined with the other flotsam and jetsam everywhere, conspire to keep maximum speeds well below a catastrophic situation. Traffic in Kabul is tense. Especially inside an armored Chevy 2500+. But it isn’t suicidal. Not for us contractors, in any case. It’s just asshole tightening. Sweat inducing. Shoulder knotting intensity.

Which brings me to the crab boy of Kabul

As the armed driver of an armored pickup truck in Kabul, commuting up to 60km a day round trip six days a week, I saw many notable things. One of the most memorable, and spotted on more than one occasion, was the crab boy. The city of Kabul is full of dysfunction, disease, pestilence, and poverty. And it’s the capital. He was one of its many lesser citizens.

No armed convoy to convey him to important meetings with egotistical officials wanting bribes. No donkey to take him to market to sell vegetables honestly farmed. Not even a stolen bicycle to get him to the bread vendor so his stomach would not feel empty.

What I remember most is his smile. The kid with the twisted spine who couldn’t stand up. He had to scuttle along like a crab, begging. But his smile. It was like the sun in his brown face. He made me feel things I don’t know how to describe. He was the sun, the life giver. That smile was so genuine.

There I was, inside an armored steel and glass mechanism that probably cost ten times the money that boy will ever touch. Sweating, bitching and arguing with my fellow contractors about banalities that mattered so very little.

The crab boy was happier than I. I made more than 10,000 dollars a month. Tax-free.

He scuttled around with his bent spine, unable to stand up, seeing the world from the dust clouds kicked up by that bustling, insane place. I don’t know how much his begging earned, but I gave him one hundred dollars every time I got the chance. I hope it made something better. For him. For his mother. For whoever his caregiver was.

Every time I unlocked the door of my armored bubble, I was breaking a rule. Every time I broke a rule, his smile was worth any punishment that could have been inflicted on me. Some rules aren’t worth following.

Some smiles are worth handing out whatever hope I have to give.

I hope that he’s still smiling, and I hope his belly is full tonight. I dream of him sometimes and wish the world was different. If I see him again, and I can, I’ll give him another hundred dollars. Or a million.

I wish I could let him see the world from a higher vantage point. I try to switch places with him. Sometimes. When I’m dreaming.

I know I can’t.

Thank you for reading this. If you have a hundred dollars, give it to someone who needs it. If you can spare it.

Pain

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“It hurts,” he screams. I want it to hurt. I turn the dial a little bit to the right. I took it. The dial I’m turning. From an old lady I killed. After it all went south. I got it off the record player on the shelf. Before I burned her and her house down to the ground.

Electricity is precious now. I use it to inflict the pain back into them. I like pissing it away. Into. The ones responsible for this nightmare that pretends to be life. I used to feel OK. That was a long time ago. Now I am haunted. And all of you are going to be haunted too. That thing you give me. Hopelessness. Endless torment. It’s coming back to eat you. I took the clay you gave me and wrapped it around myself as a shield. I’m invulnerable now. For a little while.

And I’m going to do every single person I can. Like I did that old lady. She pretended to be so sweet. But her teeth were rotten. Like the world. The one you were stupid enough to let me be born into.

Fuck you, mother. You gave me good grammar and a sense of overriding guilt. And not much else I can think of. So go fuck yourself. With those sharp fingernails you cultivated oh so carefully. That false piousness fooled no one.

He’s screaming again. Cursing me. I don’t have time to listen to this. Time to turn the dial a little further to the right.

It all flows how it’s supposed to. A teacher I had once told me that. It sort of stuck. All through everything falling apart. The world heated up. The oil ran out. The stocks went down. Inflation went up. You left and I started going crazy.

“It hurts,” he screams. Again. I turn the dial all the way up until he can’t scream anymore.

Now it’s my turn. But I’m quiet. I have a stockpile of pills that keep the screams away. For now. They’ll run out some day. My turn is coming.

Smoke and butterflies

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The day the forest caught fire I was out looking for butterflies. The ones that hide in the deepest, oldest parts. It’s been so many years now. I can’t remember anymore. Not clearly. Not like I once did. I used to remember every line in your face. Especially around the eyes where the wrinkles all came together when you smiled.

I saw the swarm of butterflies only moments before I smelled the smoke. In a clearing deep in the old forest. I watched. Mesmerized. They danced for me. Only seconds. It was the most beautiful thing.
Then I caught the smoke in my nostrils. It’s weird how time changes the reality of things. It’s weird how immediate danger changes the nature of time.

I ran for my life. For all I know those butterflies continued their dance until the smoke blotted out their warm patch of sunshine. Maybe they were still dancing when the sparks off the trees began burning their delicate, impossible wings. Do butterflies have souls? If they do I hope there is an afterlife where they continue to dance in lovely, impossible kaleidoscopes.

I met her close to home. The fire raged all around. We tried to look for you. There was no time. We called out as we ran. Hand in hand. I thought about pauses. The pauses turned into commas. Commas make me impatient. It was hard to breathe from all the smoke around us. Our calls grew weaker. Our hearts beat too fast. There was nothing left but the desperation of our need to find cooler air. We stopped calling and tried to outpace the fire. Somehow we did. We didn’t see you along the path that day.

Home. That place we all loved so much. Burned to the ground. Nothing left but memories and the feel of her hand in mine. We stood at the edge of the forest where we had lived and cried together. It was hard to talk. So many years ago. I wish I could remember the sound of your laugh. I know it tinkled sometimes. I close my eyes and try to imagine exactly how your shoulders arched when you were amused. There was something in that stance you had. Something as beautiful as the swarm of golden butterflies.

In the days after our disaster I talked to the old man who lived over the ridge. He lost everything too. His family, his livelihood, his sense of humor. He told me that he’d been out looking for medicinal plants. Said that when he smelled the smoke and began to run back towards home he saw you. He told me you were floating like a wraith through the smoke. He told me you looked at him and continued into the heart of that horrible, all consuming maelstrom of flames.

We rebuilt eventually. In a barren landscape that was already beginning to renew itself. Life is strange. It builds itself out of the bones of death. Always. A cycle that repeats over and over. I suppose it will continue until the universe itself decides the time to end has come. I look for you still. Over every trail I’ve worn through the young forest that grows around us indifferent to the past. Trees don’t remember. So I’m told.
Sometimes I think it would be better to be a tree.

I could shelter a swarm of golden butterflies under my leaves during a gentle rain. I wouldn’t struggle with the question of what happened the day of the fire. Or why you would ever want to do a thing like that. Things would be simple if I were a tree. I would be born and die in exactly the same place without ever worrying about why I can’t remember exactly what your smile looks like anymore.

Sometimes on my walks with her we come upon more butterflies. It makes me happy that they still dance. The trunks aren’t as tall or thick as the ones I remember from back then. But the butterflies are just as golden and their dances are just as magical. I look at her and I am happy. But both of us miss you and the way you used to dance. It was like you could fly. I hope somewhere you are still dancing.

They say a mischief maker started the fire that day. The ones who investigate such things. I sometimes think it was you playing with matches. You used to be fascinated by flames. We had to warn you not to sit so close to the hearth on cold nights. You would stare sometimes. Into the flames. In a way that made me think you wanted to touch them.

What makes a butterfly different from a moth. Which one were you? It doesn’t really matter. We both miss you.

The shakeup

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One dark night the Hindu gods conspired with the Celtic ones and threw the reigning aristocracy out of Heaven. A few hours later Santa Claus woke up without his skin. An animated bag of bones with a ridiculous white beard attached to a skull face. His hunger had him looking for cookies and milk immediately but he’d been trapped in a maze that contained only cheese. The new kings and queens of the universe laughed merrily.

Kurma the tortoise banded together with Abandinus and created a funhouse atmosphere that would change everything. Jesus appeared with a chainsaw and a mask. He ran around madly revving it loudly, unable to control himself. The Easter Bunny showed up with hand grenades painted in bright colors and covered with various types of glitter. Satan was made to follow behind on a leash carrying resupplies for the large rabbit. The grenades exploded in great bursts of smoke that turned into scriptural passages from the holy books of the conquered and then blew away in the wind.

Borrum blew his mighty breath out and sprinkled broken evergreens and firs across all the world’s deserts. Matsya got up to mischief when he saw what was happening and moved all the world’s fresh water around to new places. Thing that had been wet were dry and the dry places drowned. Chaos grew roots and sprouted everywhere.

It was a real party when the golems showed up with bag of presents for everyone. The big black rock in Mecca turned into an inflatable funhouse when the conspiracy really got rolling. The wall that wails started laughing in an eerie timbre and didn’t stop. The Temple Mount suddenly sported a large amusement park run by the former angels, demons, djinns and saints of the overthrown big three.

Things became a horrific carnival when The Morrígan showed up and set up a series of elimination matches for the heroes of the vanquished mythologies. Iblis and Skeleton Claus were matched against Abraham and several lesser Bene Elohim and the sands of the recently rebuilt Colosseum in Rome flowed with blood.

That Halloween shook everything up. It would have meant certain destruction for all humanity if Danu and Durga hadn’t stopped the farce. In their mothering ways, they finally convinced the rest of the long oppressed and alienated victors of Heaven to settle down and let the people worship as they pleased. As a conciliatory gesture it was decided that Santa Claus would remain a skeleton ever after to remind the people not to throw out their old gods so easily when shiny new ones came along.

All the holidays and holy sites were moved around so that people would be forced to take a fresh look at their beliefs. It was less than a month before a whole new pantheon of gods appeared out of nowhere and started fomenting trouble. As they approached Heaven to argue for equal rights for all gods, Skeleton Santa watched and sighed. He wouldn’t be getting his milk and cookies anytime soon.

Forgotten

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I was in the library browsing. I go there when I’m lost. To find myself in the pages. Among the stacks. The smell of books is the smell of home.

I noticed an old volume with a tattered, worn red binder. Not in its right place. As I stooped to look I wondered why it would be on the floor under the lowest of the shelves. Almost out of sight. The title read Mysteries Past, Present and Future. When I picked it up the book it shivered. Which made me drop it. Books should not shiver.

So I looked at it a while. A thing that should not do what it had done. The pages had opened when it fell. I made the mistake of looking too long. That’s when I fell into the book. The wood shelves and the smell of home disappeared as  gravity pulled me in. My dress fluttered in the wind made by my fall and I screamed a little but forgot to make a sound. The scream echoed around in my head. My landing was gentle and unexpected.

I am standing on the greenest grass I have ever felt wondering why my shoes are not on my feet and pondering where they have gone. The beautiful man is looking at me. His eyes are fire. His hair is long and fine. He is carved or chiseled. I cannot decide which. I want to touch him but I am afraid because I know he is not real.

“I am a poem,” he says. I say nothing. What would a girl say to a poem anyhow. We are silent for a while.

I see the grass blow gently in the wind. I look down at my feet and wiggle my toes. The sun warms me. He looks at me and I do not know anything except that I want to know everything.

“I used to be war,” he says. “But I was tired so I became a poem. I had died one too many times and the bleeding was making me weak. I was eternally hungry and I needed to be something else. Would you like to know me?”

I only nodded. Unable to speak.

The sun turned black. I disappeared and we were stars with the eyes of eagles. He twinkled at me from inside impossibility and then all the stars around us twinkled. “Those are ghosts,” he said. They are all already dead. This light we are is always moving, always changing, always being reborn in other universes. I am a poem.” He twinkled again.

I felt the baby inside me. And it was him. He spoke to me. “Life is the greatest gift. The understanding of love washes all sins away in tsunamis that cannot be denied. When I was hungry on the floor of the library you loved me without knowing what it was you were about to love. I thank you.” He was born then, in an instant.

I screamed in pain and thankfulness as he stepped into the world from between my legs. He looked at me in a way no one ever has or ever will again. The oldest newborn. Helpless, silent, all knowing. Needing me. Needing love. Needing to exist.

“I am a poem,” he cried. I understood everything and I held him in my arms. We didn’t speak for a while. He warmed me. I warmed him. Then he suckled and the understanding grew. Something shifted again.

I am standing in front of a mirror looking at myself. And he is standing behind me. In a warmly lit boudoir that is tastefully decorated. We are both naked and wrinkled. He is covered in a story that is tattooed on his skin. The words flow downward from his neck. They are coiling around his form. Alive and ever changing. The color of his eyes is changing too. He wraps his arms around me and whispers in my ear.

“Isn’t time beautiful? Can you see yet?” I realize that I can. And he starts to pleasure me from behind. We are old and this is the loveliest thing I’ve ever done. I close my eyes and let him fill me up. He moans and I moan and we become a song that rises and falls gently in waves.

We sing together for a while and enjoy our time as a harmony. We read for a while and we become stories. We dance for a while and we become an endless flow. Time stands still and time spreads out in every direction seeking life and understanding of life. I can see from the beginning to the end with my eyes closed.

When I open them I am in the library again. My home. Among the stacks. Waiting to be instructed. I have lived here forever. In infinite possibilities and endless gnawing wishes for understanding. In words that undulate and change depending on the vantage point from which they are read.

He is a poem and he is my master. I clutch his red, cracked spine to my breasts and hold him tight for a while. When I can bring myself to share him I will put him back where I found him under the shelves forgotten and eternally waiting for you.

The door

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Greg Smith took a deep breath and looked up the face of Old Man. The crisp granite had a wet sheen to it this morning. He glanced up the hundreds of feet that he was planning to on-sight. He’d climbed the Old Man before, but never on this side. It was going to be one hell of an adventure. Particularly because he had never done it alone.

Their fight this morning had been epic. Sheila was pissed. She didn’t want him going up the mountain alone. She didn’t understand his need to escape the rat race. Or the feeling of freedom he could only find at the top. How it took him out of his head. Out of the petty problems he was sick of dealing with. Work was dragging him down. Today, regardless of what anyone else wanted or needed from him, he was going to climb.

Greg checked his equipment and looked at the sun. He breathed again. Put the job out of his mind. Put the argument with Sheila away. I’ll make up with her tonight he thought. He began to climb. The rock called to him. The top called to him. All of it sang softly. The cool, crisp air. The warm sun on his back as he worked his way slowly upwards.

After he’d reached a distance he guessed was about 200 feet up from the bottom, he stopped for a minute to collect himself. He placed an anchor point into the face, checked his chalk, harness and carabiners, and continued upward.

After what seemed like a few minutes but was actually more than an hour Greg stopped again and took in the view. The valley below was breathtaking from this height. He saw an eagle above him and wondered what it was hunting. From this high he wouldn’t be able to spot whatever the bird was stalking. He looked down anyhow.

A vehicle’s dust trail was coming down the gravel road towards where he had parked. Greg wondered if he knew the climber or climbers inside. He wondered what Sheila was doing. If she was still fuming at him for needing this today. Those worries could wait. He begin wedge a nut into a crack in the face. And felt the first trembling. His heart skipped a beat. Had the mountain just moved?

He looked up. Then down. What the hell? This time the earth definitely shook. The mountain was unhappy. He clung to the face, desperately trying to get the nut further in. He gave it a tug and attached the rope. The mountain was shaking now. He scrabbled as dirt and small rocks came down on his helmet.  Getting his grip and settling in, he waited. More shaking came, and more showers of dirt. The rocks were bigger now. A boulder bigger than his head fell past him. And then a few more. His heart beat faster.

And then it was over. Greg looked up. No more debris. He looked down and saw two figures far below. The vehicle had pulled up next to his Xterra and he could see two small figures looking up at him.

Should I go up or down? He couldn’t believe his brain was wondering this. I need to go down. What if the Old Man shakes again? For reasons he couldn’t understand Greg found himself looking for the next handhold leading up. He began climbing again.

Then he discovered the door. The impossible door. Set a few inches into the face was a red wooden door with an ornate brass knob that looked like a human face. Stunned, Greg paused on the face. What the hell? After a minute, unable to contain his curiosity, he climbed up to the beckoning mystery and put his hand on the handle. He turned the knob.

Greg stepped into the door in the mountain wondering what was happening to him. This place couldn’t be real. It hadn’t been here the last time he climbed Old Man. He felt nervous and excited.  Inside, the room he found himself in was filled with cool air but warmly lit. He took it in, stunned. A rectangular space with rich wood paneling. Most of the wall space in the impossible place he found himself was dedicated to bookshelves. He took in the entirety of the madness and noticed more details.

He saw a fireplace. The fire crackled and glowed invitingly. Rich carpets and comfortable reading chairs were scattered about in between the shelves in the walls.

“Welcome Greg.”

He gasped as he noticed a composed, regal woman sitting in one of the chairs nearest the crackling fire. She was dressed in a white flowing garment that shimmered in the firelight. She looking at him commandingly.

“Please, have a seat. We have a discussion ahead of us.”

Greg’s knees went weak. He automatically grabbed for the harness, intending to check the rope. It wasn’t there. Astonished, he looked down and realized that he was no longer wearing his climbing gear. Rather, his outfit consisted of his favorite cargo pants and sneakers. His continued the self-inspection and realized that he was dressed for lounging around the house on a fall day.

“What the hell?” Greg turned towards the red door unsure what he should do. The door was no longer there. The place he had just stepped into the room through was now a bookshelf. He noticed one of the titles on a red spine: Abrahaim Abadi.

“Take a breath Greg.” The woman looked at him without any apparent emotion. “Have a seat. Let’s talk.”

Greg shuffled towards the woman woodenly. She graciously pointed at another chair on the opposite side of the fire. Oddly, she used her entire hand to point instead of a single finger. He lurched towards the seat and flopped into it feeling weak-kneed.

“What is happening to me?”

She nodded. “That’s a perfectly natural question Greg. But let’s start with orientation. My name is Saphira. I am an agent of change. You are here because you are in the midst of a major change. You’re dead Greg. And now you have to make a choice. Take a moment to let that sink in.”

Greg thought of Sheila. “I’m not dead. I’m right here. Talking to you.” Another part of him screamed silently. He felt the truth of what she was saying in his core.

“You’re dead Greg. The first rock knocked you off the Old Man. The shell of you is down at the bottom. Those two people you saw called 911. The authorities will come clean up the scene. You were dead within seconds of impact. Welcome to what some would call Purgatory. I have this discussion often Greg. You’ve had a pretty grounded life. Now it’s over. Time to choose a new one.”

The woman sipped from a cup of something on a little wooden table next to her chair. She smiled at Greg.

“Look around. Every book contains the bones of a life. You can stay in this room as long as you wish. Until you’re ready. Until you make a choice. Choose one of these lives. This is the nature of the universe.”

Greg found himself unable to speak. He looked around at the shelves and the hundreds of books.

“Gah.” It was all he could muster.

“The Hindus sort of come closer than the rest of you to getting it right. I’ll run you through the basics. Every life starts as the bones of a book. Every soul chooses which bones to anchor itself to. The rest will be up to you. The stories you see here, the bones available to you, the anchor points – they are all an algorithm. Every choice you ever made, in your time as Greg, has led to this point and these selections.”

She looked into his face. He noticed that her eyes were an impossible purple color. That she was beautiful. In a way that was somehow completely asexual.

“But what about heaven?” Greg’s voice surprised him.

“None of those ideas come close. There is no heaven. There are only infinite pathways and endless choices. And this room. You’ve been here over and over.”

Greg thought about it. The woman looked deep into him and continued.

“You have the benefit of memory for now. Once you make your choice you’ll be born again. Into the bones you’ve chosen, into the time and place you’ve selected. You won’t remember any of this life. It will be a fresh start. But it won’t be completely sanitized. Sometimes, the echoes of past incarnations will be audible. You may get prompts. You may see little glimpses of other roads you’ve walked. This is all there is. Endless stories made up of endless choices.”

The woman pointed again in her odd way, using her entire hand to sweep the bookshelves. “I’ll be here the entire time you are reading. There is no rush. This place is timeless. Compose yourself and choose a book. We have eternity to talk about your options.”