The Awareness

by Gene Stone

  “Mom!” Jessie screamed, leaning over her Carol’s body. “You shot her!” she shouted at the man.

  Carol was bleeding badly. She choked, and looked at Cooper. In her eyes he saw a wisdom, a kindness, he had never seen before. “You run now,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what you want, what you think. You just run.”

  He ran. The man wasn’t going to take the chance he’d hit another human, so he let the gun slump by his side. Jessie was gathering her mother up and helping her walk to the bus. Another woman from inside the vehicle had come out to help as well.

  Cooper sprinted behind the junipers under the watchful eyes of the plovers and the bored, rising moon. The evening had come and with it the ancient sounds and shadows.

  Jessie and the other woman helped Carol limp to the bus, which was full of curious, frightened humans trying to comprehend what had just happened. They had seen so much that this was just another incident in a day that had dawned badly.

  As Cooper approached the trees behind the house, Clio emerged from behind a small evergreen. “Let’s leave,” she said.

  But Cooper couldn’t stop staring at the bus. He had a clear view of its side, and he could see Jessie’s face pressed up against a window, her eyes frantically searching.

  Cooper stared until she spotted him, until she put her hand up to the window of the bus, which was beginning to pull away. Her tears clouded the glass.

  He nodded. “I’ll find you,” he called. “I will find you again!”

  But Jessie was gone now, and the yellow bus drove down the road, puffs of exhaust escaping in angry bursts until it disappeared down another street.

  Bear

  After he watched the human go, after he traveled past battles, past human after human and mammal after mammal, after the armies moved on to distant fields and pastures and cities, after the summer had ebbed away and the green leaves turned brown and brittle, the bear decided he’d observed all he could. He felt he could never be more aware.

  The word “creation.” It haunted him. He needed to understand it, and the only way to do that was to move. Words were meaningless in isolation and in theory. All summer he had sat in his cave, thinking, watching, wandering outside for food, lying in the sun, returning to his cave. He saw equations in the forest lines, he calculated the geometry of the sky, he sought refuge in the mathematics of his new awareness.

  The world had changed. The landscape around him seemed empty. The awareness had driven most of the animals to the fronts. But I can’t do this alone, he thought. He had always enjoyed his solitary life, but if he wanted to thrive, to experiment, to discover what awareness truly meant—if he wanted to create, he needed others. He had it in his mind to create a place where he and others could work and thrive together, where they could use their awareness, make it mean something. Something important.

  He left the cave for good. When the urge to turn and retreat back to his home overwhelmed him, he reminded himself that his fear was normal. He’d lived the way bears had always lived. But awareness meant abandoning the way of the bear.

  “I’m fine,” he whispered to himself as he traversed a ravine and through a wide strawberry patch. The berries had long since ripened. Still, he hunted for remnants, his mouth watering. He moved on to a small treeless plain sheltered by mountains and forest, and considered making it his camp. But there was no water, and he moved on. Each step took him further from everything he had known.

  He walked and walked. Over a small mountain, past a beehive, underneath watching birds, through fields still buzzing with insects mating before the coming frost. He detected animals as he traveled, but he didn’t bother them.

  He came across an expanse of wild grass. Magenta flowers leaned back toward the ground, heavy with autumn. Clouds scraped nervously along the sky. A small brook wound around the periphery.

  This was the place. A sense of warmth entered his body and settled nicely in his bones.

  He began exploring and came across the faint scent of another bear who had probably gone off to war long ago. He found a neighboring lea, not near enough to the brook, plagued by catchweed and clover and something else too. Besides weeds, the lea held the embers of man and animal. The bear sat down, closing his eyes as the wind pushed up the ghosts the earth had swallowed.

  “We are better than this,” he said aloud.

  “Are we?” A hare had snuck up behind him. “Are we better than this?”

  The bear looked down at the small animal.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Does that matter?” The hare did not take his eyes off the field.

  “I held a hare in my hands when this began. It seems like so long ago...”

  “It wasn’t me,” the hare said.

  The bear sighed.

  “I wish that this world was different,” he said simply.

  “The world is the way the world is,” the hare said. “It’s a very simple world, really. You live and then you die. Every action seems so important in between those basic steps. They’re not.”

  “I will make the world different,” the bear said. “Come with me, hare. Come with me to this little stretch of land. We can live there together. You and I.”

  “I need burrows. I need to be hidden. A field?” The hare laughed.

  “Maybe you wouldn’t need that. Maybe I could protect you?”

  The hare just stared at him. The bear rose and walked away. Before he entered the forest he turned, “I hope I see you again, hare.”

  But the hare was gone.

  The bear said to himself: “Basic steps.”

  He took his next step—he needed to find animals who had avoided the fighting. This wasn’t easy. Most behaved like the hare, too concerned with surviving than following the words of the bear. A hyperactive marmot labeled him crazy. An injured fox found him arrogant. A lost prairie dog couldn’t understand what the bear was talking about. After each encounter, the bear thanked them and moved on.

  Eventually, he stumbled across a group of sturdy beavers. He told them of his plans to build something new, a place where any creature would be welcome. The beavers shielded their eyes from the waning sun as they looked up at the bear. They seemed in awe of his size and stature, of his commanding voice and words. They listened and nodded.

  “Let’s begin,” he said.

  They began gnawing wood, shaping it and then stacking it at a fork in the brook. The bear tried to learn from them, to help them. But his paws were too large. He fumbled and dropped things. The beavers grew impatient.

  “Maybe there’s another way,” they said.

  “Yes,” the bear agreed. “We can all live in a cave. Or just out in the open. Or in a tree.”

  “No,” the beavers argued. “We can’t.”

  “I don’t know what to do then,” the bear admitted.

  “Why are you doing this at all?” one of the beavers asked. “Why not just fight? Why don’t you follow the army? Kill what needs to be killed.”

  “I can’t,” was all the bear could say. Then he added, “Why don’t you all go and fight?”

  “We lost five members of our family in one hour of warfare. That was enough for us.” The beavers dropped their heads reverently for a few moments. One of the beavers finally broke the silence.

  “We fear we are cowards. But we had to quit before we perished.” Another added, “We have to get ready for winter. That’s what we do. If not us, who will?”

  The bear nodded. His winter was coming too.

  So they continued to erect a structure next to the brook. They did the best they could. The bear thought about his answer—“I can’t”—as the animals toiled together in the cool autumn afternoon.

  Some day he would need a better answer. In the meantime, he focused on his work, watching the beavers chisel down the wood and flatten the mud, molding it into the appropriate shape and size. He watched with the wonder of a child at the building of a temple.

  One afternoon, as the bear gathered wood for the
beavers, a porcupine appeared. “What are you doing here?” the small creature asked.

  “I’m building a safe place for everyone to live.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Every animal who desires to be here,” the bear said. He reached down and carefully touched the daggers on the animal’s back. The porcupine recoiled into a ball.

  “But who among us can live under a beaver’s dam?” the creature asked, and then, as he uncoiled and shuffled off into the forest thicket, he answered his own question. “Only a beaver.”

  “Where would you like to live?” the bear called out.

  The porcupine stopped. “I’d prefer the hollow of a tree.”

  “Wouldn’t you get lonely there?”

  “I know my loneliness well. We wear each other comfortably.”

  “Am I a fool?” the bear asked the porcupine.

  “Who’s to say who’s a fool and who’s a genius? Just don’t forget to be a bear.”

  So the bear left the beavers and their dam. Politely, they asked him why he was going, and he said because he needed to move, because he would crush their work with his size and weight. The beavers and the bear waved goodbye, and they touched each other as humans did.

  The bear traveled south. He spent the next days alone. He stared into the sky. He slept for long periods and in that sleep he saw things that shook him awake, flashes of brilliant light, a sea that was calm and blue, meeting places where soft conversations were spoken by indistinguishable figures, a sky full of migrating birds. He figured they were portents, and that they mattered, but they were just out of reach, like his mother, like his understanding of humans or his need to do whatever it was he was doing.

  He decided to stay awake from sunset to sunrise. He met animals he’d never seen before. Tall birds with mammalian traits. Domesticated animals who knew the tyranny—and the love—of the human. Spirited sea mammals who swam close to the shore and blew water from holes. He saw the scars of the revolution on many of these animals—scars in their skin and fur; scars in their shaky paws, their quiet minds. He wished he could ignore these signs of death and destruction, the memories they evoked of scorched land and scorched soldiers.

  He learned to slow his mind as he traveled south. In those first few hours of awareness thoughts had come in wave after wave, but his need to understand his awareness abated now, its formerly deafening fervor a soft hum.

  Somewhere between the ocean and the forest, he stumbled across an empty human town. It was just past twilight when he found the main street. A strange yellow light flickered from the bulbs overhead. Empty storefronts and tattered homes were like patchy fur lining the street. He could imagine these humans, here in their caves and dens, their nests and houses. He found the locks and gates and hedges amusing.

  They build everything up to keep everyone out, he thought. They create these endless towns, cities. They had thrived here only recently. Now nothing but vacancy remained.

  The bear sat down on the curb. The hardness of the concrete pleased him.

  He would stay here. He would live like the humans, in their buildings, enshrouded by their warm walls and tiled roofs. Why not? Why not see what these shelters had to offer? Why not use them to create something new?

  Wandering down the street, he found an enormous building, a store, with a large sign featuring symbols and a star. He entered through the unlocked door and sifted through the endless aisles, through the showy merchandise of the human empire. He marveled at the sheer volume, at the variety of invention. And though his brain now knew the words for these human creations, he didn’t care to recall them. He just wanted to stare at these objects, then turn and rest for the night. And so he curled up in a corner where the humans had created an ersatz beach, with sand and colored balls that slowly shrank in size.

  In the morning, he went outside. A light drizzle was falling. He lifted his paws up and felt the feathery wetness, and it felt good.

  “What are you doing?” asked a squirrel. He had been watching the bear from a nearby tree branch.

  “I’m enjoying the rain.” The bear kept his arms raised, his eyes closed.

  “No, I mean what are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t care. Nor should you. Frankly, I’ve heard enough from small creatures,” the bear said.

  “Okay.” The squirrel shrugged, then he scurried off the branch and down the tree trunk. He closed his small eyes and lifted his arms up to the sky. Just like the bear.

  “This is better than war,” said the bear.

  The squirrel opened his eyes and dropped his arms.

  “Why did you have to bring that up?”

  “Bring what up?”

  “The revolution.”

  “Am I not allowed?”

  “Do you not know what’s happening?”

  “No, I don’t. But I don’t care. Come inside. I found something you might think interesting.”

  “I won’t go in there.”

  “Why?”

  “It has human residue.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Those walls were built on our backs.”

  “How so?”

  The squirrel pondered this question, and then shook his head, “I don’t know.”

  “Just come inside.”

  “No.”

  “We don’t need to fear them.”

  “You’ve never had to fear anything, bear. I have. Fear is important. It reminds us what we can and can’t do.”

  “Come inside. Sit with me. Tell me more about fear. I seem to be the type of mammal to whom small mammals tell their hardships. Talk to me. I have food for you. And a warm place to rest.”

  The squirrel considered this.

  “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt.”

  Inside, the bear tore open a package of salted nuts for the squirrel. They sat quietly in a tiled aisle and swapped stories of war and life before. The squirrel had participated in an attack led by badgers that had pushed the humans out of a small western city. The fighting had been brutal, the humans launching a counterattack using arms, chemicals, fire.

  “It sounds like a great battle,” the bear said.

  The squirrel cracked a nut in his mouth.

  “I am not sure, but I think we won.”

  After a few days, the abandoned store began to seem exactly like what the bear had set out to build so many weeks prior. He and the squirrel lived under the fluorescent lights that shone a waxy, sterile light on their fur. They broke open the windows so that the air could whip through freely. They drank water and tasted soda. They ate fruit the humans would have deemed rotten.

  Every so often remote, earthshaking noises jarred both animals. But the noises eventually stopped, and the bear and the squirrel carried on. One day a weary and wounded cat wandered in, half-starved, and the bear and the squirrel fed her so much she quickly became fat. A dark-eyed, war-ravaged raccoon made a home in the hardware section. A few other animals arrived, some healthy, some starved, some driven half-crazy by war. A weasel stepped through the sliding glass doors, smiling to see what his future held, and died on the spot.

  One day, the bear slipped on a puddle of water that had formed after a heavy rain battered the store. He tried to grab onto a rack of winter coats, but he was too heavy, and both bear and coats hit the floor with a loud thud. The squirrel and the cat laughed, and then the bear laughed. The bear laughed so hard that his rumbles rustled the branches of the snow-laden trees outside. The cat laughed so hard she cried; she had to stop laughing eventually because her stomach hurt. But the bear kept on.

  And it was as if that laughter had wings, as if that laughter had taken on an odd corporeality. It sprang into the wind like a child in need of an embrace and twisted in the late autumn cold. The laughter comforted mammals who felt that cold as they never had before. It was as if their new mental awareness had heightened their awareness of their bodies. They had discovered discomfort. Many felt the sting of death. Many felt the first pangs of a
dolescent letdown at the realization that life and time will always win. Many hated war. But as they heard the laughter sweeping the air, they stopped shivering for a few brief moments, they forgot the dead, they remembered that time hadn’t beaten them just yet and that there was a sun, bright and steady, waiting behind a cloud, resting before its ascension.

  The laughter slowed, stilling into silence. But remnants were kept alive by a chain of animals who wouldn’t let the laughter die, who spread it from mountain to meadow. One whispered to another, “Did you hear about the bear who can laugh louder than thunder?”

  “Did you hear about the bear who lives where the humans lived?”

  “Did you hear about the bear who doesn’t fight?”

  Some mammals hated to hear talk of this bear; they didn’t believe in him or the stories attached to him. Laughter is not thunder. No one had really heard any laughter.

  But a few wanted to believe. A network of sorts formed by accident—animals who had tired of the war, or whose awareness had now settled into their souls, who wanted something different from it than rage or vengeance. These animals pointed the way. Go west, they said, or east, or north. Just go. And a few more animals listened, and believed, and began an exodus from their burrows and nests, from the fronts and the battles in the interminable revolution, in order to seek out the bear.

  When the new arrivals joined him, the bear saw their skepticism and sensed their weariness. “Come,” he’d say. “Sit.” And the animals would. The squirrel, the cat, the raccoon, and the others would bring food and drink. And the bear would shrink down as low as he could and ask the animals about their journeys, the troubles they had witnessed on the road. Sometimes, because of something the bear or perhaps the cat or the squirrel had said, someone laughed. When the newcomers heard that oddly familiar laughter they began to believe that this was a better place than the last.

  It didn’t take long for the animals who came to the bear to thrive in the human ruins. Overhead, owls and magpies and hawks circled, watching. The birds retained their mystery.

  In the background booms rang out. But the animals grew to ignore the din. They began to shed their need to sniff the air, to feel the currents, to mark a territory.