Ugly Behavior

Stones

Sometimes when he looked at his hands, he could see them hardening, the skin flaking away, the muscles stiffening, and suddenly he was earth again, suddenly he was stone.

Every few months when Carter first felt the weakness, he would make a trip to the place of the stones. Here, he would stare at the rounded boulders, the broken fragments, the huge dark slabs pushed out of the sandy soil, until the weakness passed. The weakness, which came upon him fiercely, usually manifested itself as an overwhelming need to die. This seemed reasonable. The whole world was dying around him. Cities deteriorated, falling into rubble. Streams slowed down from all the garbage they contained. People in general seemed more sluggish than he remembered from childhood. It was as if everything he saw was slowly solidifying, losing energy, turning to stone. As if this were the natural state of things. And so the weakness came, a compulsion to be turned into stone.

When the weakness passed, Carter would leave the stones, go out and take someone else’s life away from them. Freeze their existence. Turn them into stone instead.

The stones always made him feel better.

The stones lay scattered across a high hilltop five miles from the small house where Carter grew up. He’d asked about them in town—one old man who used to be a schoolteacher said they had been deposited there by glacier action. But Carter could not believe the stones could be that old.

There were three or four stones the size of boulders, probably several tons apiece. He imagined they must have come from some place deep underground, where everything was larger than life. These were rounded, with only slight depressions. A half-dozen stones one step down in size were much more angular, with many sharp edges, as if they had broken off larger stones. The scale of stones went down from there. To smaller rounded pieces that still might crush a body completely if dropped a distance. To large rocks for pounding a skull in. To fragments sharp and dangerous as ancient arrowheads. Down to water-smooth pebbles ready for a slingshot, the size of harsh thoughts worn from repetition.

Every time Carter came here, he would stare at the stones for hours, seeking some sort of summation which would keep them solid in his mind forever. But stones were hard to define. Loose estimations of size, looser descriptions of shape.

All stones, he theorized, had come down from the original stone, the huge mass that had given birth to everything by destroying itself. All glory, all life came from this unreasoning, dead stone. After thrashing about in cold silence, it had awakened from its long dream as a world, lived on by these parasitic creatures called human beings.

The history of this original stone, as with all stones, must have been a history of splittings and fallings apart: slab became boulder and boulder became stone and stone became pebbles rolled and smoothed by the outer lips of an enormous sea.

Carter played close attention to how soil filled the cracks in the stone, plants growing where once it had been impervious. This, he concluded, was how life first began in the midst of cold, hard death.

The remainders of this great original stone, the slabs and peaks of it, became the distant mountains, and were used to build the temples of human beings.

Stone constantly reminds us of our own deaths, he thought.

Watching the pebbles gathered about the bases of the larger stones, trailing off into grass and dirt, always filled Carter with a nameless anxiety. Separate from its larger pieces, stone drifts, wanders, moved by people and scattered by the wind. The center does not hold. Anywhere.

The stones were unyielding, blind, and despite their constant exposure to all weathers, always dry.

Each time he came here, he walked slowly up the hill, his chest gradually filling with stones. A fresh body in his arms. Sometimes the skin of the body would be bruised, if his knife had not been efficient enough, and he’d had to use a stone to remind the flesh of both its origins and its destiny. Sometimes he might try to press a stone into the victim’s head, pounding until the skull broke and the stone lodged there like a jewel. The pieces of skull themselves were like poor cousins to stone, a reminder of how far human beings had declined in their devolution.

Over the years his eyes had hardened, gone to stone. His tongue had the stillness of stone. But, of course, the world was stone, and more and more he felt a part of it.

He would lay the body down among the larger stones, then pick up a fist-sized piece, the size and shape of a brain. Holding the stone in his hand was like holding the world.

He thought to tell the stones about the dreams and aspirations, the life history of his latest victim, but the language of the stones had no words for such things. Instead he would stoop and fill his victim’s mouth with the pebbles he found.

The stones grew harder the longer he looked. They thrived on the intensity of his gaze. He would touch them worshipfully. Touching stone, his fingers imitated its stiffness, its need to be all in one place.

Each time he would bend down to kiss his victims, but their mouths would be filled with stone.

Sometimes, if he stared long enough, he found he could climb inside the stones, despite their increased hardness.

Inside the stones it was quiet. Inside the stones he could lie down and watch the pictures moving slowly across their inner walls.

There were always pictures of children, and lovers he would never have, and more victims he would desperately try to bring closer with his knife. Sometimes he regretted loving his victims so much that he had to kill them, although he wasn’t sure where such guilt came from.

All flesh was stone in any case, only in its initial soft phase. And everyone knew it was impossible to kill a stone.