Sure, but what about the bear...
Even now, to recall what we’d made of the bear generates in me a species of panic. An awful thing, born again, shining and shaking there between us on the mossy floor of the forest. An example of Mandibole’s thirst for extreme novelty.
We made of it a kind of thick flesh toroid. Later, Gregor would refer to it as the filthy donut, a term which would reduce him to giggles and tears simultaneously. The hide of the new beast was studded with a series of hook-like bony structures which it used to pull itself along the ground. Not as a hoop would roll, understand, but in a poloidal rotation, like any decent nightmare. Round and through and back and up and over and round again the hide and its hooks would roll in a nauseating rhythm, quickly clawing up, puncturing, and shredding the undergrowth. The hide itself was somehow segmented and sat lightly on the muscle beneath, or not at all, attaching and reattaching as the rotations progressed. Otherwise the beast would have wrung itself out to death. Though not as powerful as its previous incarnation, the beast was surprisingly swift in its motion, moving easily across the terrain.
The hooks were followed by puckered nodules which opened and shut randomly, revealing red, rolling eyes, unidentifiable pink nubs, and the pulsing surfaces of black, glistening organs. Small pockets of straining ligamentous tissue. Clusters of teeth. Gaping dark vacuities that expelled foam, blood, yellow viscous fluids or reeking fumes. A few of the nodules whistled, a high, whining tone, surprisingly clear.
This sound, combined with the firecracker popping of the impossible joints buried within the beast dislocating and resetting as it moved, was enough to cause surrounding wildlife to scream in protest. Grey swarms of gnats and no-see-ums rose from every surface and pulsed in field patterns around us, as if we were magnets or cursed objects. Small birds and rodents shrieked and shat in unison. The corvids began to gather, crows and larger ravens, divebombing the abomination in rage and confusion, streaking it with the white punctuation of their shit.
One of these latter, braver than its fellows, or perhaps having already lost its small bird mind, managed to land on a briefly motionless part of the bear, and thrusting its black beak into a quivering nodule, drew it back with a twitching fibrous lump, oval and pierced through with smooth holes that dripped black steaming pellets. The raven lifted off in a panic; the tip of its lower beak had penetrated one of these holes, and the black material merged and flowed upward across the face of the bird, leaving a smoking trail in the feathers. All of this happened in less than a second, but by virtue of the weird temporal perception we laboured under, seemed to take whole, agonizing minutes.
That perception ended in the next second, when the bear did what bears do very well. It roared.
It was a sound unlike anything heard before or since, I’m convinced. I’d never heard anything like it, and I hope to never hear it again. Whether triggered by the raven’s removal of that anomalous organ, or by its own pain, or some other unknowable internal process, the bear roared. Along its spinning, rotating girth multiple nodules lined up and opened, pouring raw decibels into the center of the toroid. Can sound waves feed on themselves, growing larger as a result? Can they be held, somehow, held and layered and compressed, before being released? I still do not know, but that was the effect. This roar was one to end worlds, and went on for whole minutes. Gregor and I fell to our faces in the blood and viscera-soaked moss, wrapped useless arms around our bludgeoned ears.
Mandibole stood, or performed an analogous action. I was close enough to touch the cryptid, plunge my hand into the offensive, unreal structure of it, tear chunks of pseudo-spiritual matter from whatever it used for bone. I could have done this, but I could not say if it stood. There was a movement, and a pulse, and then Mandibole was standing.
The bear, the filthy donut, calmed itself, closed its myriad anguished mouths, opened a collection of eyes along its length, and those eyes rolled in their fresh, seeping sockets to gaze at Mandibole with something like affection. How did it think? Where, in that twisting tube of meat, did the brain lie, and did that brain have a concept for what it now was? I swear it looked upon its creator, and upon us, with fondness. We had raped the animal, and it was thankful.
Mandibole stood before the bear. Mandibole raised its arms in another of their queer hieratic gestures, or a fractal amalgamation of hieratic gestures. Like watching a sick rainbow shatter against the sky, the gesture was, but with it the ritual was complete. We rose into more formal postures to mark the moment: Gregor and I pulled ourselves from the stinking ground and knelt before Mandibole, gore-slick hands on our knees, while the bear closed its mouths and rotated its bone hooks so that they pointed to the sky. That furred wheel of eyes shone and danced in the fading light.
We remained in that hellish tableau for yet another eternity. I recall Gregor whispering to himself softly, something about Bosch and jealousy.
And then Mandibole let us go.
Does a puppet feel bereft when the puppeteer drops the sticks and strings? Abandoned? Does the withdrawal of a motivating force from above manifest as a sensation of evisceration, a profound and debilitating removal of something essential? I don’t know from actual puppets. All I can know is that, having served its purposes, Mandibole discarding me felt like the ultimate sucker punch. I vomited right then and there and moaned through the spew, as did Gregor.
The bear reared up, or at least puffed itself out and up, into a greater thickness, a somehow deeper presentation of whatever it now was. Massive and implacable, as ever, but a robust horror fresh in the world. The hair that covered it bristled and rose, it opened every mouth, bared all the teeth. The bone hooks retracted behind the moaning, mobile plates of its hide, then extended to their full length and rattled against each other in an awful clatter. Exultant, it rolled away into the brush and was gone from sight, trailed and assaulted by a motley horde of forest dwellers and birds. Later, Gregor would claim that he glimpsed a few of the enraged critters being absorbed into the mass of the bear as the grisly parade receded into the concealing bush. He wouldn’t say how they were absorbed, exactly. But then, who would want to describe that, given an opportunity.
What had we done, after all? In the darkening hours that followed, as we carefully picked our way along the trail back to Stonefish House, we gingerly speculated on the event, even as the reality of it faded into merciful memory. As our rational, Stonefish-bound selves gamely twisted it out of shape using the time-honoured tools of Reason, Logic, Second Guessing, and Denial. Gregor spoke almost exclusively in air quotes as we talked, qualifying everything, denying it even as he affirmed. What had we done? What was accomplished, that pleased Mandibole so much? And the thing was pleased, before it left us there in the gore and muck to come back to our meagre senses. Mandibole glowed with pleasure, its whole being buzzed and frothed, and its eyes verged on warmth. That much we could tell, before Mandibole, its mad work done, laddered up and away from that place.
Upon our return, Gregor immediately set to feeding us, talking all the while. Gregor felt that we had somehow exteriorized the soul of the bear. “The soul is not in the body,” he said. “I use these words knowing how inadequate they are, Den. I mean, the fucking soul? Please. But there’s something there, isn’t there? Somehow, it’s an element of the simulation. We can’t not factor it in! I’ve got one, you’ve got one. Some essential thing to our persons. Li’l Dougie had one, before they laddered up to their realm. And maybe they still have one, though how would we know. Maybe they put it in those fucking pebbles of theirs. Either way, they fucked Li’l Dougie up. Broke their soul. Like we fucked that bear. So what was that thing that it had us make with him? From the bear.”
“A monster,” I said.
“An angel.” Gregor began to shake violently, then he got up to pace the room. I hadn’t any appetite and so left much of my plate untouched. “You gonna eat any of that?”
“Can’t. No. And it was a bear, Gregor. Still.”
He grabbed the meal
and began wolfing it down as he paced. “Was it. Was it?” From his throat issued an awful growling whine and for a moment I feared he was choking. “Yes. Yes, I think you’re right, Den. It was a bear. It was still a bear. I think, maybe, that it was more bear than it had ever been. Bear plus.”
“Maybe.”
He finally sat down again, in order to properly clean my plate with the edge of a fork. “Goddamn famished,” he breathed between mouthfuls. I wondered aloud how he could eat, when only a couple of hours before we had been elbow deep in living viscera.
“How can I not? Everybody Hungry, Den.”
“Not me.”
“No. You are. Just not for this.” He was finished, and placed the fork upon the plate, pushed it to the middle of the table. “Not this. Maybe novelty. You’re like them, like Mandibole, and Babayoko. Double Ramsey and the ODB and As You Know Bob. You’re the worst, kid.”
“Fuck you, Gregor.” I felt sick, unwholesome. “I can’t eat. Can barely think about what we’ve done. Thinking about it makes me think about killing myself.” It was true. It seemed a fair trade to me, but I knew, and I think Gregor did too, that I wouldn’t do it. Or couldn’t, when it came down to it, because he was right about me. In some way that actually mattered, I was like them. I was landotter. I knew their lusts, their manifold drives and idiosyncrasies. Doing what we’d done to the bear was a crime, but it was a new crime, and I’d responded to it as they would. They were a part of me. I said this last aloud, and Gregor laughed.
“Well, yeah. Jesus. I thought that was clear. Let us make man in our image, they said, and fuck, these things don’t kid around. Probably why they’re so disappointed in how we’ve turned out. As long as we live, we’re an indictment. Anyway.”
“I ought to end things. Isn’t there supposed to be a balance? Shouldn’t there be, I dunno, can’t we make a decision, take some path that matters?”
“Naw. Fuck them, son. Besides, the bear’s still alive.” He grunted, wiped at his beard with the back of his sleeve. “So far as we know. A new thing under the sun. It’s what they want. Novelty.” He stood, clapped a hand to my shoulder, then crumpled to the floor beside me. Gregor’s arms wrapped around me like pythons, his head fell to rest like a queasy boulder tottering at the top of my spine. The pressure was profoundly uncomfortable but I dared not move. I felt the heat of tears rolling down the back of my neck. Gregor was weeping.
“Things are going to start happening very quickly now, son. Oh, Den, I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t understand what you mean...”
“We’ve been tested. You get that, right? Say you do. The bear was an examination, I don’t know for what, and I don’t know how we did. But I don’t care, honestly. I don’t care what my score is, I don’t want what they want for me, I don’t need to see what’s coming.”
“Damnit, Gregor, what’s coming?”
“All quickly, now. I know it like you know when you have to take a shit, that cold-gut certainty. They’ll want to move things along. Step up their timetable.”
“Gregor!” I couldn’t stand it. His grip, his ridiculous tears, this profound unmanning he was experiencing. And I hated myself for gendering his reaction at all, placing impossible standards on him. He was human, at base, at his best, and everything that made him so was coming apart. I felt petty and vicious, so, human also, and as I wrenched free of his clingy grasp, the spite rolled up and out of me in a cold torrent. “Jesus, man! You’re losing your shit now? Fucking hell! Pussy piece of shit! Fuck you. Fuck you, Gregor!”
I wasn’t ashamed then, not in the heat of it, but I am now. If I’m in the shitbox now, and I am, I am, then I deserve it. Deserve the stark choice that’s been set before me. Gregor, though. Even then, Gregor knew, and was right, and made his choice.
I can’t claim it was any better than mine.
***
I slept all that night and well into the afternoon of the next day. A black sleep, empty of content. The time with Mandibole had pushed me beyond exhaustion, into a liminal state at the edge of death. No energy for the maintenance of any kind of self-image was left in me. No spark of dream. Coma Lite. I awoke finally to watery illumination through the skylights and a long, almost languorous moment wherein I flirted with that enlightenment the Buddhists claim is always just there upon waking, where you don’t know where or what you are, or who. The moment passed and took its promise with it.
Gregor cooked for us that night. Dragged himself through his own despair to the commissary and prepared a meal, then roused me on the intercom, his voice a lazy bark echoing off the tired walls of my room.
“Soup’s on. Come and get it, kid.”
So I did. Besides, I was hungry, finally.
The meal was literally soup, or rather a kind of stew. Tender cuts of meat roped with puffy fats and falling apart at a touch, in a thick broth of root vegetables, kohlrabi or beets, I couldn’t tell. Lentils. Chunks of onion. Smoky warmth of paprika, habañero heat. The overall effect was of redness. A red, red stew, and I realized I wasn’t just hungry. I was famished.
Gregor sighed as he sat down across from me. He poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on the table.
“Before you ask, it’s just stew.” He proceeded to down the glass entire, shrugged. “The meat’s printed, and I found the other ingredients kicking around the cupboards.”
“Not your fairy food.”
“Not their magic, no. The meat of one thing, tubers from another thing, bits of plants that pretend to flavor upon contact with bits of tongue, molecules coded as water, maybe some wine. I don’t know. Eat.”
I ate, and of course it was delicious. Simple, hearty, nourishing, and perfect. Gregor rose at one point and brought the pot from the stovetop. Seconds were had, then he leaned back in his chair and fixed me with his eyes.
“You’ll find yourself in a room, Den,” he began. “After you leave here. You’ll be in a room, a spare and squalid little space where a palpable despair seeps from the very walls, my young friend. Den. Den, there’s black mould in the corners. Sunlight pooling like piss at your feet. Can you feel it, that despair? You will.”
“Jesus, Gregor,” I started, but he held up a hand to stop me.
“And you’ll have a choice, Den. Everything they’ve done, everything they’ve grown here, it all comes down to that. A choice. It’s brutal, and simple, and in its way, very beautiful. A choice that’s generated everything in existence, this crystal in solution.
“It’s the First Law of the Universe, Den. You’re hungry. You want something to eat?”
“Thanks, but, y’know.” I passed a hand over the empty bowl.
“And you will again. Your momma’s cream of wheat? With the jam in the middle? Or some of this red stuff? Something else. What I’m saying is that choice? It’s coming again, for you, specifically, in a way that...Jesus. Jesus, Den, I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like for you. Whatever you choose, I’m not sure it will matter. Well. Not the way we’d like it to, anyway.”
My stomach was full but I can say I’d never felt quite as empty as I did right then, listening to Gregor. The space opening up inside me had a different quality than the howling void of mind I’d felt under Mandibole’s influence. Anticipatory? Patient.
Gregor sat back up to look in the pot. “Still a bit left. Thirds?”
My mouth was dry and my vision swam. “Pass.”
“Suit yourself.”
“What’s this about, Gregor?”
“I’ve come to my own choice, Den. It was the bear that clarified things for me. The bear, and thinking about you, thinking about my boy. Li’l Dougie, and the world. My place in it. What’s it all mean, right?
“What I figure is this: they’ve wanted us to come down from the mountain and tell people. Everybody Hungry? Everybody shits, but it’s more fun for them when there’s a fan to fling the stuff into. So the archons let Rushkoff616 go and they return here, like a spawning salmon. I show up to check on my old friend
and find a brain-damaged AI instead, but they’ve got me, the archons, and they get me good, Den. I’m theirs, but I fight, because fuck ’em, right.”
“Fuck them.”
“And they take my boy from me. I’m punished. Whether or not Jeremy ever existed, I’m punished. Over and again. Shown things no one should ever see, learned things far worse. They’ve got me, but I’m ruined. Just another broken piece of their broken world, and I stay here. I make that choice not to go back to the world. I stay up the mountain.
“Then they arrange for you to find me. Say what you like, Den, about the how and the why of your arrival at Stonefish House, but by now you know, deep down, that free will’s always been something of a crock.”
The emptiness swelled inside and then went still. Patient and silent, a predator. I felt the muscles of my face twitch and jump in response, fibres trying to tear free of the bone, revealing a thing. Gregor saw it.
“Yeah, and now they have you. Black eyes soon, I think. Sharpened teeth. You’re their man, Den. I can’t tell you what to do. Can’t make your choices for you. Mine, though. I can make mine, for what it’s going to be worth.”
“This is, what, you digging in your heels? Now, at the fucking eleventh hour? What are you going to do, Gregor?” I hissed through clenched teeth. He chuckled, and stood up to start clearing the table.
“Do? Already done the first part. But there’s still the bear to consider. They wanted us to make it. Mandibole liked having us there as his helping hands. I feel my part in it. I’m responsible for it, that fresh novelty in the world. Fuck knows what it’s going to do, where it’s going to go. Whatever that is, it’s on us. On me.”
Stonefish Page 26
