so beyond my conceptions of what was even possible. One of these things I had never known before was that Lydia knew how to play the guitar. She laughed a nervous little laugh when the thing was first in her arms, apologizing, excuse-making for her playing before she’d even begun to play, saying how she was years out of practice and so on. Tal said, don’t be modest, I don’t care, let’s hear you play it. I can’t play it, she said. Lydia strummed it once, and frowned at how out of tune it was. She twanged a string, with her head bent low over the golden body of hollow wood, her hair hanging down over the hole in the middle of it. She listened, her eyes closed in concentration, and with her left hand screwed and unscrewed the keys on the long end of the instrument while checking and balancing the looseness or tightness of the strings by softly hitting them with the knuckle of her thumb. Tal waited for her to tune the guitar with the skeleton marionette crumpled at her feet in a pile of painted wooden bones, and I watched. When she thought she had it tuned Lydia strummed it again, and the warm full note whanged out loudly and faded away, and with it the skeleton rose up from the floor. Lydia began to play a song on the guitar. I was amazed at the way her lithe strong slender fingers squeezed notes from that delicate machine of wood and wire. It was a joyful song, it was joyful noise. On the floor, the skeleton decided to dance to the music. Something about the combination of music and puppetry and the effects of the lumpy white cigarette did not frighten but rather transfixed me. The laughter of the two women, the clicking limbs of the wooden skeleton dancing like a dervish to the guitar from which Lydia’s hands coaxed a series of sublime noises: it was hypnotism. Soon there were two wooden Xs in Tal’s competent hands, and now there were two creatures dancing on the floor of her apartment to the music of the guitar: the Arabian belly dancer—blush-cheeked, diaphanous-veiled, and glitter-skinned—was now dancing with the skeleton, representing Eros and Thanatos respectively, sex dancing with death. Now a dance demon entered me. Now I, Bruno, was dancing with the puppets: a tangle of thin hairy limbs I was, jumping and swerving in—if not time, then an approximation of it—along with the puppets, as if they were my fellow living creatures: for at that moment, as brainless and artificial and as wooden-bodied as I knew them to be (the only brains they had they had by proxy from their mover and creator), for a long moment, the music and their movement made me fully accept them as conscious beings. Faster and faster we danced, the puppets clicking and rattling around me, the guitar ringing out, the trains rumbling past the window in the dark, the two women’s voices in constant laughter, and me with my body and mind in a waking fever dream, a trance.
When Lydia could play the guitar no longer, when Tal’s fingers and arms were exhausted from dancing the puppets, and when my own arms and legs were numb with fatigue, we all fell down together. Lydia and Tal collapsed on the couch. I collapsed on the floor. The puppets also collapsed on the floor. For a time (who knows how long?—Chronos had been murdered for one night), we all lay there, listening to the occasional roar of the train outside the kitchen window, Lydia and Tal hot-faced and gasping from too much laughter, Bruno panting on the floor, the guitar sleeping silently in Lydia’s lap, and the puppets lying danceless beside me with their strings limp around their crumpled bodies.
When it was time for bed, Tal pushed on the back of the couch, which turned into a flat, uncomfortable bed. A blanket and a pillow were procured for me, in order to mimic homier sleeping conditions. Lydia kissed me and tucked me into this makeshift bed. The world was like a big warm pot of stew that I had dunked my head in. Then Lydia joined Tal in the bedroom. In the dark, the muddy ugly orange light from the streetlights outside crept into the room, casting the shadows of the puppets against the opposite