The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Although I had Sensio for another four years after I was sent back north, he never spoke to me again. Not a single word. Not even to tell me, one more time, that he was not a rabbit. I woke one morning and he was dead: just an old white rabbit with patchy fur, lying on his side, and looking out toward something I could not see.

  FINDING SONORIA

  John Crake and Jim Bolger sat in Crake's living room. A small blue-green postage stamp lay on the old, low coffee table in front of them.

  Bolger was a private detective once known all over Minnesota for his skill at finding people. He had the face of a pug and the build of a construction worker, or a weightlifter gone to seed. The jacket he wore made him seem even bigger, almost rectangular.

  Crake had retired as a surveyor for the county three years ago. He'd been used to getting up at dawn and walking and driving around for hours. He had gained a little weight since his retirement, but not much, and he still wore bright plaid shirts, the kind of clothing that might distinguish him from a deer.

  To Crake, the slopped-on cologne smell rising from Bolger was a surprise. To Bolger, Crake looked too tall even sitting down, but also like easy money.

  "You want me to find a fucking country?" Bolger said. He picked up the stamp. In his palm, it looked like a strange Band-Aid. "Ever heard of the Internet, or the library?"

  Crake had to resist the urge to tell Bolger to put it down, and Bolger, noticing that hesitation, moved the stamp to his other hand, then back again.

  "I've checked the Internet, but there's no `Sonoria,' just Sonora. Now I want you to try. Is that a problem?" Crake said. Ever since a throat cancer scare, Crake's voice had been low, and sometimes, whether he wanted it to or not, it sounded menacing. His wife Grace had loved the new voice, but she'd died of breast cancer the next year. He'd had no kids with Grace, had restarted his stamp collection after she was gone.

  "If it's there, I want you to find it," Crake said. Crake's mind worked one way. He wanted a mind that worked another way.

  Bolger just looked at him. But the fact was, Bolger's business had been in the crapper ever since he'd been hired by a state senator to spy on the man's wife. Bolger had entered into the case with gusto and delivered the news of the wife's multiple affairs with a cheerfulness that, looking back, Bolger figured he should have dialed down a bit. It wasn't so much "kill the messenger" as "kill the messenger's business."

  In the old days, Bolger wouldn't have been in Crake's house, drinking tap water out of a dirty glass. In the old days, Crake would've come to the Imperial Hotel and paid for good whiskey and they would've sat in leather chairs, Bolger messing with his gold cufflinks or his expensive watch while Crake got smaller and smaller in Bolger's presence.

  Crake had offered Bolger sardines, too, because Grace had liked them, so Crake still stocked up on them. Crake, staring across at Bolger, thought, This is the kind ofperson who would blast a warning shot ifI crossed his lawn.

  "Look," Crake said, "it'll be worth your while. And if the place doesn't exist, that's not your fault."

  Bolger snorted. "You got that right." It was the kind of snort Crake would've expected from a sausage, if a sausage could snort.

  "So what do you say, Mr. Bolger?"

  "Sonoria. A country not on the map. You want it found. Okay, I'll find it for you, Mr. Surveyor. Four hundred a day plus expenses - and that's cheap."

  Even as he said it, Bolger knew he was willing to go as low as two hundred a day, but what kind of client had faith in someone who started out as a discount detective?

  "I can't afford that," Crake said, lying. He had a good pension, and a couple hundred thousand he'd stolen from people while surveying, buried out in the yard.

  "Well, fuck, Crake, why did I come all the way over here, then?"

  "I can't afford it. I'm sorry." Crake wasn't stingy, but he didn't want to pay too much for something this risky.

  "How about two hundred a day?" As soon as he said it, Bolger was cursing himself. Too large a drop; it looked bad.

  "I can't afford that, either." Crake thought: I can't afford to spend that much just because I've been having dreams about the place.

  Bolger looked down at the table, back up at Crake. "You're a cheap motherfucker."

  "And your business is in the toilet."

  There. Crake had said it, and now Bolger thought he knew why Crake had called him.

  Bolger half-rose, sat back down, feeling awkwardly like some kind of caged animal.

  "You bastard. Well, what the hell can you afford?" Bolger said.

  "Fifty a day."

  "Fifty? Fifty." Bolger felt for a second like his heart, which sometimes seemed lodged in his large gut, was going to stop beating.

  "There shouldn't be much in the way of expenses."

  "Fifty, huh."

  That should cover his daily rent at least, a little gas. He still had some savings and a couple of residual clients.

  Crake rose suddenly and put out his hand, forcing Bolger to rise awkwardly and do the same.

  "I know you can do it," Crake said as they shook hands, as if Bolger'd already agreed.

  Bolger sighed. "And I know it's fucking insane, Crake. But I guess that's your problem, right?"

  Crake's grip was stronger than the man looked, and Bolger's hand ached as he walked through the snow back out to his car.

  As a child, Crake had collected stamps for their exotic qualities, and the colors. His mother approved, but his father, a tough bastard who claimed he'd been a Golden Gloves champ and had once made his living selling women's deodorant door-to-door, thought it was a hobby for "sissies." By the time his father was prematurely forcing him to learn how to drive with a clutch and signing him up for baseball, Crake had put aside the stamps.

  Once, though, before he gave it up, his mother had given him a dozen stamps from "Nippon." Delicate traceries of cherry blossoms and storks and other images had conveyed a kind of distant otherness that made him shiver. At the time, he hadn't realized "Nippon" meant "Japan," and so the country itself had been a mystery, a place not found on the globe, waiting to be discovered. Even as late as eighteen or nineteen he'd remember those stamps and think that someday he would have a job that allowed him to travel a lot. Instead, he'd fallen into the path of least resistance: easy surveying job, wife, and inheriting his parents' home when they died.

  Now, though, Crake had found another undiscovered country: Sonoria. Only, he couldn't find it on the map. The stamp had come with a Lewis & Clark commemorative set: small, triangular, trapped in a corner, the illustrated side facing away. The back of the stamp had yellow discoloration, indicating some age, the glue having melted.

  Memories of the Nippon stamps, long lost, came to him as he sat at the worn table in the dining room, under a single light bulb. The bass of someone's idling car outside throbbed on and on despite the late hour. The neighborhood had changed; now he knew only Mrs. Stevenson and her daughter Rachel, who lived on the corner.

  When he had found it, Crake had taken a pair of tweezers and extracted the odd stamp from the envelope. He turned it over and set it down on the table, on top of the envelope. It was an etching, very carefully rendered, of a mountain range, with a river winding through the foreground. Whoever had created the stamp had managed to mix muted colors - greens, blues, purples, and browns - into a clever tapestry of texture. For a moment, the river seemed to move, and Crake drew in his breath, sat back, magnifying glass clutched tightly in his hand. Across the three corners of the stamp, he read the words "Republic of Sonoria."

  Crake raised an eyebrow. Sonoria? He'd never heard of it. It sounded faintly Eastern European - Romania? - and it was true he still had trouble identifying the former Soviet republics, but it still sounded false to him. He stared at the picture on the stamp again, shivered a little as if a breeze blew across the grassy plains surrounding the river. Something about the image stirred some deeply buried recognition.

  Carefully, as if the precision were important, he picked
up the stamp using the tweezers and placed it back in the envelope, in the same position, with the front facing inward. Then he walked over to the map of the world framed in his bedroom, and he looked for Sonoria. First, he tried Eastern Europe, then Central Asia, then random places, then systematically from left to right. No Sonoria in Asia, Europe, South America. No island named Sonoria. No isthmus. No province. No state. No city. Nothing. Unless it was so small it wouldn't show up on a map? Or it was one of those countries that had disappeared into the maw of another country?

  Then he stood back, gazing at the map. It was probably a fake stamp someone had stuck in there as a joke. That's what Grace would've said. Just a joke. Why should he waste his time with it?

  But that night, as Crake tried to get to sleep, he recalled the weathered quality of the stamp, the yellowish stain on the back, the high quality of the image on the front, and something about it worried at him, made him restless. He felt hot and out of sorts. When he did finally get to sleep, he dreamed he stood in front of a huge rendering of the stamp that blotted out the sky. The image in the stamp was composed of huge dots, but the dots began to bleed together, and then swirled into a photograph that became a living, moving scene. On the plains, strange animals were moving. Over the wide and roiling river, kingfishers dove and reappeared, bills thick with fish. The mountains in the distance were wreathed with cloud. A smell came to him, of mint and chocolate and fresh air far from the exhaust and haze of cities. Then the stars came up in a sky of purest black and blotted it all out, and he woke gasping for breath, afraid, so afraid, that he might forget this glimpse, this door into the Republic of Sonoria.

  Bolger had heard none of this from Crake, of course, but had managed in his rough but uncanny way to intuit a narrow vein of madness in Crake's words during their initial meeting. It hadn't hurt that he'd bugged Crake's phone, though, and learned that Crake continued to call the post office about "Sonoria" and to make other calls that suggested Bolger could've charged much more than fifty dollars an hour.

  He had also talked to a few of Crake's friends from the surveyor's department as well as the neighbors. Bolger had ruled out the stamp as a prank as a result. Everybody said Crake was a straight arrow - so straight it was ridiculous.

  Truth was, Bolger still thought the joke might be on him. Sonoria. Was Crake in cahoots with the state senator, trying to make him look stupid? The whole story sounded like one of Bolger's mother's stories. He always knew the stories were bullshit, but at night, lying in bed with the sounds of his father knocking things over in the garage, he'd liked them anyway.

  Bolger had a color photo of the stamp that he kept on the bed stand in his room at the Murat by-the-hour motel. It was the last thing he saw when he went to bed at night, and the first thing he saw when he woke up. When he had a hooker come by, they almost always noticed the damn stamp, maybe because it was the only thing in the place with any color to it.

  At first, Bolger's own dreams focused on the councilman, and how this Sonoria assignment was all a big hoax to harass him. He saw a headline in his dreams: DISCOUNT DETECTIVE LOOKS FOR IMAGINARY COUNTRY.

  But then the dreams began to change. The Republic of Sonoria. Where might that be? He didn't know, but he did know that in his dreams he had drawn his hand across the surface of a mighty river and felt the thick wet weight of it slap against his palm. He knew that his pants leg had been stained with the yellow-green of the grasses of the plains. His face had felt the breath of the place upon it. Jeez Louise, he'd smelled the fucking dirt, for chrissakes! No dream had ever been so real, so true, and sometimes even when he woke to the warm body of a woman in his bed, he wished he was still in dream. Sometimes, too, when he woke, Bolger remembered Crake's firm handshake and wondered if it had been a kind of trigger.

  Bolger told none of this to Crake. All Crake got were the standard progress reports Bolger gave him over the phone. For reasons Bolger couldn't put into words, he didn't want to visit Crake's house again if he could help it. Maybe because it reminded him too much of his old man's place, and getting the shit kicked out of him every other week.

  Bolger would open the bed stand drawer and take out the gun given to him by his father, and an old color photo of his mother standing on a bridge in Prague.

  Then he would call Crake.

  "Yeah, Crake? I went to the post office. I asked the stupid questions you didn't have the balls to ask. They've never heard of Sonoria. It's not in their computers. You can't send a package there. I mean, you could try - you could address something to Bumfuck, Sonoria, and see if it came back - but it's not in the computers. And, listen, they don't have anything close to it, either. No `Slonoria,' `Shonoria,' `Snoria,' or whatever. Sonora's a fucking desert, not a country, just a county, with no `i.' So much for misspellings. Over and out."

  Crake didn't know why Bolger said "over and out," and Bolger never told him it was left over from a brief stint driving a truck for his dad. Mostly they'd hauled timber out of Canada, and it had been the most boring work Bolger had ever done. Getting out of it had also meant getting the fuck away from his dad, so he'd split. But he still liked that phrase, "over and out." It had a way of shutting up whoever was on the other end.

  Crake appreciated "over and out," because he'd been about to make a big mistake. If Bolger hadn't cut him off, Crake would've blurted out, "But I know it's real! I've been there. I've walked along the riverbank. I've run through the plains. I've walked toward the mountains."

  Crake, in his house by himself, no longer got any satisfaction from his stamps. Instead, he thought about Sonoria a lot, and Bolger. He wondered what Bolger's life must be like, solving mysteries for a living. As a surveyor, he'd spent a lot of time outside, measuring - a lot of time in the spring and summer hammering little stakes with red flags into the ground so people could sell properties or rezone them. This seemed so far from Bolger's experience of life. And yet now their worlds were the same world, all because of a stamp.

  Bolger, meanwhile, kept looking, needing that fifty dollars a day, dutifully mailed to him by Crake in six-day increments. Bolger didn't know why Crake insisted on six-day increments, and it pissed him off because it seemed arbitrary and yet organized. Crake did it because he had a thing about threes, and because it fit the increments in which he'd buried the stolen money, but Bolger never figured that out.

  The Internet and the library came next on Bolger's list, simultaneously because he no longer had a computer. In a particle-board stall at the library, he found out that "Sonora" was also a music company, a snake, and a kind of thunderstorm in California. "Sonoria" was nothing. Wondering, in a purely theoretical way, if a piece of information had fallen through the cracks, he spent hours huddled over remaining archives of decaying microfiche, focusing on obscure newspapers and old travel magazines. Maybe it had been a place, a long time ago. Over time, Bolger's vivid dreams of the place had begun to infiltrate his days. He had them idling in the car at a stop light, in line at the mini-mart to buy some beer. But the closer he got, the farther away he got, too, in some strange way. And he knew it.

  One night, drunk, Bolger called Crake up.

  "It's getting away from us, my friend," Bolger said, taking a swig of vodka. Everyone was his friend when he was drunk, in that cozy, soft light way particular to some television interview shows.

  Crake's voice was so low that Bolger couldn't understand him over the crappy connection.

  "What, Crake? What did you say, my friend?"

  "I said I'm paying you to do a job, not be my friend. Do you have anything new to report?"

  "Well, all right, then, my friend. Tough love. I get it." Bolger hung up.

  It was just him in the Murat Motel.

  It was just Crake in his little rotting house.

  And Sonoria - out there, somewhere.

  Crake couldn't stand waiting around for Bolger to call. It got to him mostly because he was smart enough to know it meant he didn't have enough to do. So he took to plotting out and measuring and
marking the limits of his backyard, which, being on the last row in the neighborhood, opened up onto a new-growth forest of pines, all planted in straight lines. He dug up parts of the backyard, took the packets he found and put them somewhere else in the yard. Even Grace hadn't known about the money; or, rather, he'd never told her. Crake had always figured Grace knew his secrets whether he told her or not.

  When he got tired of digging, Crake pored over old surveying maps, looked up the owners of the house from before his parents' time. This got stale fast, and because he was bored and because he couldn't help himself, he started writing about Sonoria. He did this chiefly because no matter how often he took the stamp out now, fixing it in his imagination, the stamp gradually lost its intensity for him. After a time, so did the dreams. The dreams became as faded as the stamp. The stamp became as faded as the dreams. Finally, Crake's vision of Sonoria faded to a single pixel.

  So he wrote. He got out an old oversized blank book full of graph paper and he began with a small map. It didn't have much detail, because he had no idea what the real names for things like the river might be, but it was a start. Then he described the river, the plains, and before he knew it he had the beginnings of a fake history for the place. Fake because when Bolger finally found Sonoria almost everything detailed in his book would turn out to be untrue. An oligarchy for a government, exports mostly agricultural, but also gold reserves. In the mountains, there lived a species of mountain goat with curved horns much prized for its meat. Aware also, with irritation, that his imagination might not be up to the task.