The Bone Clocks

119A’S FIRST-FLOOR GALLERY is dominated by an elliptical table of walnut wood that was here when Xi Lo bought the house in the 1890s. The chairs are mismatched, from various eras since. Pearly light enters through the three arched windows. The paintings on the long walls were gifts to Xi Lo or Holokai from the artists: a blushing desert dawn by Georgia O’Keeffe, A. Y. Jackson’s view of Port Radium, Diego Quispe Tito’s Sunset over the Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Faith Nulander’s Hooker and John in Marble Cemetery. At one end is Agnello Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time. It is worth more than the building and its neighbors combined. “I know this one,” says Holly, staring at the Bronzino. “The original’s in the National Gallery, in London. I used to go and see it in my lunchbreak, when I worked at the homeless center at St. Martin in the Fields.”

“Yes,” I say. Holly doesn’t need a story about how the National’s copy and the original got switched in Vienna in 1860. Anyway, she’s moved on to the Bronzino’s unworthy companion, Self Portrait of Yu Leon Marinus, 1969. Holly recognizes the face and turns to me accusingly. I nod, sheepishly. “Absurd, of course, and sheer arrogance to hang it in this company, but Xi Lo, our founder, insisted. We keep it there for his sake.”

Sadaqat enters from the door by the astrolabe, bringing our drinks on a tray. Nobody has the stomach for eggs Benedict. He asks, “Now, where is everyone sitting?” Holly chooses the gondola chair at the end, nearest the way out. Sadaqat asks our guest, “Irish Breakfast blend, Ms. Sykes? Your mother’s Irish, I believe.”

“She was, yes,” says Holly. “That’s grand, thanks.”

Sadaqat places a matching willow-pattern teapot and teacup, a jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar on a mat. My green tea is brewing in a black iron teapot owned by Choudary Marinus, two selves ago. Arkady drinks coffee from a bowl. Sadaqat puts a lit candle in a stained-glass cup as a centerpiece. “To brighten the place up. It can get a little tomblike in here.”

In a parallel universe the man’s a design fascist, subsays Arkady.

“Just what we need, Sadaqat,” I say. He leaves, pleased.

Holly folds her arms. “You’d better begin. I’m too …”

“We’ve invited you here this morning,” I say, “to learn about us and our cosmology. About Atemporals and psychosoterics.”

This sounds like a business seminar, Marinus, subsays Arkady.

“Hold on,” says Holly. “You lost me at ‘Atemporals.’ ”

“Prick us, we bleed,” says Arkady, cupping his coffee bowl, “tickle us, we laugh, poison us, we die, but afterwe die, we come back. Marinus here has gone through this—thirty-nine lives, is it?”

“Forty, if we include poor Heidi Cross at her bungalow by the Isle of Sheppey.” I notice Holly watching me for signs of a second head or a maniacal cackle.

“I’m still a newbie,” says Arkady, “on my fifth self. Dying still reallyfreaks me out, in the Dusk, looking over the Dunes …”

“What dusk?” asks Holly. “What dunes?”

“ TheDusk,” Arkady says, “between life and death. We see it from the High Ridge. It’s a beautiful, fearsome sight. All the souls, the pale lights, crossing over, blown by the Seaward Wind to the Last Sea. Which, of course, isn’t really a sea at all, but—”

“Wait wait wait.” Holly leans forwards. “You’re saying you’ve died? That you’ve seen all this yourselves?”

Arkady drinks from his coffee bowl, then wipes his lips. “Yes, Ms. Sykes, to both your questions. But the Landward Wind blows our souls back, like it or not. Back over the High Ridge, back into the Light of Day, and then we hear a noise like … a town being dropped, and everything in it smashing to bits.” Arkady asks me, “Fair description?”

“It’ll do. Then we wake up in a new body, a child’s, usually in need of urgent repair, just vacated by its previous owner.”

“At the cafй,” Holly turns to me, “you said that Hugo Lamb’s lot, the Anchorites, are immortal ‘with terms and conditions.’ Are you and they the same?”

“No. We live in this spiral of resurrections involuntarily. We don’t know how, or why us. We never sought it. Our first selves died in one of the usual ways, we saw the Dusk as Arkady just described, then forty-nine days later we came back.”

“From then on,” Arkady unthreads and rethreads his ponytail, “we’re stuck on repeat. Our second body grew, matured, died; bam, we’re back in the Dusk; then, whoosh, forty-nine days later, we’re waking up back on earth—in a body of the opposite gender, just to well and truly screw your head up.”

Swearing won’t make you more credible, I subreprimand him. “What matters,” I tell Holly, “is that no one pays for our atemporality. Its cost we alone pay. Our phylum, if you will, is herbivorous.”

From the street below we hear the screech of brakes.