Mr. Bones by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online

was murmuring as if in prayer, pleading for his life, as Mara said, “This is a Burmese
dah,
but we have similar knives in Mizoram. Some are well made. Most of them are tools,” she went on, examining the blade, “instruments for cutting—for killing.” Now she held it to his anguished face. “They are not trophies. Not art, but useful objects. Now I think you know that.”
    Minor Watt backed away, looking at the ugly thing in her hand, reminding her that he had been kind to her.
    â€œHere’s what I want you to do for me,” Mara said.
    â€œAnything,” he said.
    â€œRemove all your clothes,” she said.
    Without raising her voice, Mara repeated her request. And he obeyed, undressing slowly, and finally stepping out of his boxer shorts, one hand cupped at his groin for the sake of modesty, the other raised to protect his face, at the level of the blade.
    Begging her now, he was gabbling, and Mara’s look of disgust convinced him that she meant to kill him. She made as if to slash him, but only nicked his chin. Even so, he howled at the sight of the blood that dripped on his pale belly.
    She prodded again, moving him with the blade into the elevator and down to the ground floor, then let him run. And—grateful, eager—he fled from the apartment, out of the building, naked, his hands and body smeared, absurd, from his touching his wounds, a laughingstock on the busy street, a hilarious news item in these anxious times.

Mr. Bones
    W HENEVER I GET sentimental and take on a reminiscing tone and talk about how my father used to read to me and encourage me, I realize that I’m lying. Is it a way of being kind to his memory, like “You look marvelous,” something he used to say? “Pretty as a picture”—seldom true. “Looks good enough to eat,” over my mother’s gristly meatloaf. But then generosity can often seem to verge on the satirical.
    My father, apparently a simple cheery soul, seemed impossible to know. His smiles made him impenetrable. In his lifetime I found it hard to see through his niceness, and even now, ten years after his death, he seems more enigmatic than ever. There he stands, at a little distance, jingling coins in his pocket, waiting for someone to need him, a satisfied man with the sort of good humor and obliging manner I associate with an old-fashioned servant. “Glad to oblige!”
    A smile is the hardest expression to fathom—you don’t inquire, you don’t even wonder. He must have known that. I never thought: Who is he? What does he want? He said he was happy. He would not have said otherwise, but though I believed him, there were things I didn’t know. At the period I am thinking of, he had just lost his job. Never mind, he found another one. Did he like it? “I’m tickled to death!”
    He was so thoroughly nice it did not occur to us that we did not know him. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke. He never went out at night except to church. Bowling and the movies he abandoned after first becoming a father. He had few friends, no close ones, no confidants—he wasn’t the confiding type. He wasn’t a joiner.
    I was eleven. With two older brothers and a younger sister—there would be three more children eventually—I was invisible, in the lower middle of the pack, always a few steps behind, beneath notice. And my father was the insubstantial presence he wished to be, merely a voice, a man who lived in the house. Dramatic entrance, and then silence. A hush. Dramatic departure, and then silence again.
    This all sounds harmonious, yet there was disorder and tension and conflict in our household. It was crooked in the angular splinters in the woodwork, pulsing in the air, a disturbance that was deep, subtle, and without any voice, a noiseless bewilderment and uncertainty, the vibrant presence of low-pitched rivalries, and it was all masked by politeness, or