The bones came from somewhere.
She knew this the way you know the sun is a nuclear furnace — factually, at a distance that permits breakfast. The calcium in her femur was forged in a dying star, passed through soil, through water, through the roots of whatever grew in whatever field fed whatever animal whose milk her mother drank. The genealogy was true and irrelevant. She walked on the bones and the bones worked and the origin story was a thing she could tell at parties.
Then she read what the mine looked like.
Not the star — she’d always known about the star, and the star was blameless in the way that physics is blameless, which is to say: completely. The mine. The specific hole in the specific ground where the calcium was extracted in the specific decade when extraction meant what it meant. The photographs were not abstract. The people in the photographs were not metaphors.
The bones didn’t change. That was the thing she couldn’t get past. She flexed her hand and the bones articulated exactly as before. No new ache. No ghost weight. The calcium didn’t know where it had been, and neither did the bones, and neither — she was forced to admit — did the walking. She walked the same. The gait was the gait. The capacity the mine had furnished was indistinguishable from the capacity it would have furnished if the mine had been clean.
She wanted the bones to feel different. She wanted a somatic marker, a flinch, something her body would do that her mind couldn’t override — proof that knowledge had penetrated the material. But the material was already formed. The calcium was calcium. It didn’t carry the mine’s history in its lattice structure. It carried load.
Someone told her: you didn’t choose the calcium. As if the absence of choice were the same as the absence of complicity. As if the bones could disclaim the mine because the bones hadn’t placed the order. But the bones were standing. The bones were walking. The bones were using the calcium to do the things that bones do, and the using was ongoing even if the choosing was past.
She tried not walking. Sat very still in a chair for a long time. This accomplished nothing except proving that the chair also came from somewhere.
What she wanted was a way to be made of the material without being made of the history. What she found was that the material is the history. Not symbolically. Chemically. The calcium in her bones is the calcium from the mine is the calcium from the soil is the calcium from the star, and each of these is equally true and none of them is the one her body knows. Her body knows: weight, flex, hold.
The photographs stayed in her mind longer than she expected. Not because she looked at them again — she didn’t — but because they had reorganized something she couldn’t locate. The bones still didn’t ache. The gait was still the gait. But she noticed the walking now. Before the photographs, walking was transparent — the way grammar is transparent to a native speaker. Now it had a slight opacity. Not pain. Not guilt. Just: she could feel herself using the thing that came from the place.
She decided this was not enough and also all there was.
The bones would go on being bones. They would carry her through hallways and up stairs and across the parking lot and none of this carrying would be a moral act and all of it would be an act performed with material that had a history. She couldn’t separate the function from the provenance. She couldn’t make the provenance change the function. She lived in the gap between those two facts, which was not a gap at all but the ordinary condition of being a body in a world where everything comes from somewhere and the somewhere is not always clean.
She walked home. The bones worked. The sun, which was also a furnace, was setting.