Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories

by Terry Bisson

  “Also, you need somebody desperate enough do it.”

  His laugh was as dry as his palms were moist. “Let’s just say ‘adventurous.’ ”

  Sorel joined us in the hall on the way to what DeCandyle called the “launch lab.” I could tell by the rustling sound of her walk that she had changed clothes. I later learned that she wore a NASA-type nylon jumpsuit on our “LAD insertions.”

  I was pleased to find myself in the driver’s seat again. Sorel strapped herself in beside me this time.

  My left hand was left free but my right hand was guided into an oversized stiff rubber mitten.

  “The purpose of this glove, which we call the handbasket,” DeCandyle said, “is to join our two LAD voyagers more closely together. We have learned that through constant physical contact, some perceptual contact is maintained in LAD space. The name is our little joke. To hell in a handbasket?”

  “I get it,” I said. Then I heard a click and realized he had not been talking to me but into a tape recorder. “How long will this trip last?” I asked.

  “Insertion,” DeCandyle corrected. “And we have found it’s best not to discuss duration; that way we avoid clashes between objective and subjective time. As a matter of fact, we prefer that you not verbalize your experiences at all, but commit them strictly to canvas. You will be driven home immediately after retrocution, or reentry, and not expected to participate in any debriefings with Dr. Sorel and myself.”

  Click.

  If I had any further questions, I couldn’t think of them. How much can you want to know about getting yourself killed?

  “Good,” DeCandyle said. I heard his footsteps walking away, and then I heard the drawing of the curtain that meant the trip—insertion—was about to begin.

  “Ready, Dr. Sorel?” The car’s monitoring systems started up with a low hum, like an idling engine.

  Sorel said, “Ready.” Her hand joined mine in the glove. It felt awkward. Rather than hold hands, we turned them so that only the backs of our hands touched.

  “Series forty-one, insertion one.” Click.

  Again I felt the tiny sting; the sudden sense of shame and then the wind from somewhere else; and I was floating once more upward toward the lattice of light. This time, alarmingly, I could “see” a dark shape below that could only be the car, with two bodies slumped forward hideously, one of them mine— But I was gone. Then far off I saw the Blue Ridge, and beyond it Mount Mitchell, which I had painted from every side in every season, even though I knew it was not visible from Durham. The mountains are lost forever to the blind and I felt a sharp sorrow; then my sorrow, with my mountain, was lost in the light. The light! A shadow, chasing from below, drew closer and flowed into me, and then out again as light. I felt it as an other: a presence not quite separate, womanly yet part of me, linked to me like two fingers on one hand as under the lattice of light we spun. Again I felt the sweet warmth like unending orgasm—only there was no “again”: Each moment was as the first. The lattice of light stayed always at the same distance, almost close enough to touch, and yet as distant as a galaxy. Space was as indistinct and undifferentiated as Time. The presence linked with me somehow doubled my own ecstasy; I felt, I was, twice everything.

  Then something pulled me downward, and I was alone, unlinked (unwhole?) again, spinning away from the light, feeling the warmth fade behind. Life from here looked as dark and lonesome as the grave. As before, there was the shock, the insult of pain, the agony as the cooled blood with its cold understandings rushed in . . .

  Bringing another darkness.

  “Retrocution at five thirty-three P.M. Click.”

  I was on the gurney again. Sorel must have revived (or “retrocuted”) first, for she was helping DeCandyle. I sat dazed, silent, numb, while they recorded my vital signs. Her fingers felt familiar and I wondered if we had held hands while we were dead.

  “How long?” I asked, finally.

  “I thought we weren’t going to ask that question,” DeCandyle said.

  “I’ll drive him home,” said Sorel. She drove even faster than before. For the twenty-minute ride we listened to the radio—Mahler—and didn’t speak. I didn’t invite her in; I didn’t have to. We both knew exactly what was going to happen. I heard her steps behind me on the gravel, on the step, on the floor. While I knelt to light the space heater—for the studio was cold—I heard the long pull of the zipper on her jumpsuit. By the time I had turned around she was helping me with my clothes, silent, efficient, and fast, and her mouth was cold; her tongue and her nipples were cold; I was naked like her and falling with her into my own cold unmade studio bed, exploring that body that was so strange and yet so utterly familiar. When I entered her it was she who entered me: We came together in a way that I had forgotten was possible.

  Forgotten? I had never known, never dreamed of passion like this.

  Twenty minutes later, she was dressed and gone without a word.

  * * *

  My ex came by on Thursday with her boyfriend—excuse me, partner—to drop off some microwavables. She left him in the cruiser with the engine idling. “You’re painting again?” she said. I could hear her shuffling through my canvases, even though she knows it annoys me. “That’s good. They say abstract art’s good therapy.”

  She was looking at “Lattice of Light,” or perhaps “Spinners.” My ex thinks all art is therapy.

  “It’s not therapy,” I said. “Remember the experiment? The dreams? The professors at Duke?” I felt a sudden foolish impulse to explain myself to her. “And it’s not an abstract, either. In the dreams, I can see.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “Only, I had those two checked out. I have a friend in the dean’s office. They’re not professors. At least, not at Duke.”

  “They’re from Berkeley,” I said.

  “Berkeley? That explains everything.”

  * * *

  On Monday at ten, Sorel picked me up in the Honda. I offered her my hand, and from the tentative, almost reluctant way she shook it, I could tell that our sexual encounter had taken place in another realm altogether. That was fine with me. I found the university’s FM station on the van’s radio and we listened to Shulgin all the way to Durham. “The Dance of the Dead.” I was beginning to like the way she drove.

  DeCandyle was waiting impatiently in the launch lab. “On this second insertion, we’re going to try and penetrate a little deeper,” he said. Click.

  “Deeper?” I asked. How could you get deeper than dead?

  He spoke to me and the tape at the same time. “So far on this series we have seen only the outer regions of LAD space. Beyond the threshold of light, there lies yet another LAD realm. It, also, seems to have an objective reality. On this insertion we will observe without penetrating that realm.” Click.

  Sorel entered the room; I recognized the swishing of her nylon jumpsuit. I was strapped into the car and my hand was guided into the glove—and I recoiled in disgust. Something was in there. It was like putting my hand into a bucket of cold entrails.

  “The handbasket now contains a circulating plasma solution,” DeCandyle said. “Our hope is it that will keep a more positive contact between our two LAD voyagers.” Click.

  “You mean necronauts,” I said.

  He didn’t laugh; I hadn’t expected him to. I slid my hand into the handbasket. The stuff was slick and sticky at the same time. Sorel’s hand joined mine. Our fingers met with no awkwardness; even with a kind of comfortable, lascivious hunger. DeCandyle asked: “Ready?”

  Ready? For a week I had thought of nothing but the intensity, the excitement—the light of LAD space. The lab’s machines started with their low harmony of hums. It seemed to be taking forever. The solution in the glove began to circulate while I waited for the injection that would free me from the prison of my blindness.

  “Series forty-one, insertion two,” DeCandyle said. Click.

  Oh death, where is thy sting? My heart was pounding.

  Then it stopped.
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  I could feel my blood pool, grow thick, grow cool. My body seemed to elongate—then suddenly I was gone; peeling away, up from the car, away from my body, into the light.

  I was rising as if being pulled. There was no time to look back at my own body, or the mountains. Faster and faster, we were ascending into the realm of the dead: LAD space. I say we, for I was a shadow pursuing a shadow, yet together we were a circle of light, spinning in a dance harmonious. I ached for Sorel like a planet aches for its sun. The light loved us—and we spun, basking in its sweet climactic endless glow, luxuriating in a nakedness so total that the body itself has been stripped off and set aside. I felt like the gods must feel, knowing that the world we lurch through in life is only their cast-off clothes. We rose into the lattice of light and it opened before us . . .

  And I felt a sudden fear. It was slight, like the chill on the back of your neck when a door opens that shouldn’t be opened. The light was darkening around me and the presence at the end of my fingertips was suddenly gone. I was alone. I thought (yes, dead, but I “thought”!) something had gone wrong in the lab.

  All was still. I was in a new darkness. Only this was a darkness unlike the darkness of blindness: Here, somehow, I could see. I was alone on a gray plain that stretched forever in every direction, but instead of space I felt claustrophobia, for every horizon was close enough to touch. The chill had become a deep, cruel, vicious, bone cold. I tried to move and the darkness itself moved with me . . .

  “Retrocution at three oh seven,” DeCandyle was saying; Sorel was slapping my cheeks. “We lost contact,” I heard her say.

  I wasn’t in the car; I was lying down on the wheeled gurney. I was freezing. “Duration one hundred thirty-seven minutes,” DeCandyle said. Click.

  I sat up and held my face in my hands. Both cheeks were cold. Both hands were shaking.

  “I’ll drive him home,” Sorel said.

  “Where were we?” I asked, but she wouldn’t answer me. Instead she drove faster and faster.

  My studio was cold and I knelt to light the space heater. I fumbled with the damp matches, afraid she would leave, until I felt her hand on the back of my neck. She was undressed already, pulling me toward the bed, toward her plump, taut, cool breasts; her opening thighs. I forgot the chill I had felt in her womb, as cold and sweet as her mouth. How backward romance’s metaphors are! For it is the flesh, scorned in song for so many centuries, that leads the spirit toward the light. Underneath our nakedness we discovered more nakedness still, entering and opening one another, until together we soared like creatures that cannot fly alone, but only joined; the naked flesh going where our naked spirits had been only hours before. What we made was more than love.

  “Does he know?” I asked, afterward, when we were lying in the dark. I like the darkness; it equalizes things.

  “Know? Who?”

  “DeCandyle. Who do you think?”

  “What I do is none of his business,” she said. “And what he knows, is none of yours.” It was the end of our first and longest conversation. I slept for six hours and when I woke up she was gone.

  * * *

  “Turns out I have a friend at Berkeley too,” my ex said when she came by on Thursday to drop off some microwavables. Cops have friends everywhere; at least they think of them as friends.

  “DeCandyle was in the medical school until he was kicked out for selling drugs. The other one was in comparative lit until she was kicked out in her junior year. All very hush-hush, but it seems she was using drugs to recruit students for experiments. I think there was even a death involved. I have another friend who’s checking the PD files.”

  “Dum de-dum dum,” I said.

  “I’m just giving you the facts, Ray. What you do with them, if anything, is up to you.” She was shuffling through my stacked canvases again. “I’m glad to see you’re doing mountains again. They were always your best sellers. And what have we here? Pornography?”

  “Eye of the beholder,” I said.

  “Bullshit. Don’t you think this is a little—gynecological—for Natural Geographic? I know they show tits and all, but—”

  “It’s National,” I said. “And do me a favor—” I nodded toward her partner, who was standing just inside the door, foolishly thinking that if he stood perfectly still I wouldn’t know he was there. “As long as you and your boyfriend are playing Sergeant Friday, check out one more name for me.”

  * * *

  On Monday I was supposed to deliver the first batch of paintings in the series. DeCandyle sent a hired van to pick me up. I knew the driver. He was a local part-time preacher and abortion-clinic bomber. I was careful to keep the paintings covered as we loaded them in.

  “I hear you’re working with the Hell Docs,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about; I’m just going in for a treatment,” I lied. “I am blind, you know.”

  “Whatever you say,” he said. “I hear they’re sending a man and a woman to Hell. Sort of a new Adam and Eve.”

  He laughed. I didn’t.

  * * *

  “Magnificent,” said DeCandyle, when he unwrapped the paintings in his office. “How can you do it? I could understand touch, sculpture; but painting? Colors?”

  “I know what it looks like while I’m working on it,” I said. “After it’s dry, no. If you need a theory, my theory is that colors have smells; smells that are pitched too high for most people. So I’m like a dog that can hear a high-pitched whistle. That’s why I paint in oil and not acrylic.”

  “So you don’t agree with the article in the Sun that it’s a psychic ability?”

  “As a scientist, surely you don’t believe that crap.”

  “As a scientist,” DeCandyle said, “I don’t know what I believe anymore. But let’s go to work.”

  There was something different about the echoes in the launch lab. I was led directly to the gurney, and helped onto it. “Where’s the car?” I protested.

  “We are dispensing with the car for the rest of this series,” DeCandyle said. I knew he was only partly talking to me when I heard the click of his recorder. “With this insertion we will begin using the C-T, or Cold Tissue, chamber developed while I was in Europe. It will allow us to penetrate deeper into LAD space.” Click.

  “Deeper?” I was alarmed; I didn’t like lying down. “By staying dead longer?”

  “Not necessarily longer,” DeCandyle said. “The C-T chamber will cool the home tissue more rapidly, allowing faster LAD penetration. We hope on this insertion to actually penetrate the threshold barrier.” Click.

  By home tissue he meant the corpse. “I don’t like this,” I said. I sat up on the gurney. “It’s not in my contract.”

  “Your contract calls for five LAD insertions,” DeCandyle said. “However, if you don’t want to go—”

  Just then Sorel came into the room in her jumpsuit. I could hear the swishing of the nylon between her legs.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want to go,” I said. “I just want—” But I didn’t know what I wanted. I lay back down and she lay down beside me. I heard the snap of tubes being attached; guided by hers, my hand slid into the smelly, cold mash of the glove. Our fingers met and entwined. They were like teenagers, getting together in secret, each with its own little libido.

  “Series forty-one, insertion three,” DeCandyle said. Click.

  The gurney was rolling and we were pushed into a small chamber. I felt rather than heard a door close just behind my head: a softer click. I panicked, but Sorel clutched my hand and the smell of atropine and formaldehyde filled the air. I felt myself falling—no, rising, with Sorel, linked, hand in hand, toward the light. This time we went more slowly and I saw our bodies laid out, spinning, naked as the day we were born. We rose into the lattice of light and it parted around us like a song.

  And it was gone.

  All around was the gray darkness.

  We were on the Other Side.

  I felt nothing. It filled me.
I was frozen.

  Sorel’s presence now had a form; she who had been all light was all flesh. I find it impossible to describe even though I was to paint it several times. She had legs, but they were strangely segmented; breasts, but not the breasts my lips and fingers knew; her hands were blunt, her face was blank, and her hips and what I can only call her mind, were bone white. She moved away into the gray distance and I moved with her, still linked “hand” to “hand.”

  I felt—I knew—I had always been dreaming and only this was real. The space around me was a blank and endless gray. “Life” had been a dream; this was all there was.

  I drifted. I seemed to have a body again, although it was not in my control. For hours, centuries, eternities we drifted through a world as small as a coffin, yet never reached an end. At the still center of it all was a circle of stones. I followed Sorel down toward them. Somebody—or something—was inside.

  Waiting.

  She passed through the stones toward the Other, pulling me with her. I pushed back; then pulled away, filled with terror. For I had touched stone. Nothing here was real and yet—I had touched stone. Suddenly I knew I was awake because everything was dark, only I could no longer see.

  Beside me was her body; its dead hand clutching mine. I had never before awakened—retrocuted—before Sorel. I reached up with my left hand, fearfully, tentatively until I felt the lid of my coffin just where I knew it would be. It was porcelain or steel, not stone. But cold as stone.

  I tried to scream but there was no air. Before I could scream there was a shock, and I fell into another, a darker, darkness.

  * * *

  “What you felt was the roof of the C-T chamber,” DeCandyle was saying. “It enables you to remain in LAD space longer without damage to the home tissue. And with ultrasonic blood cooling, to cross directly to the Other Side.” It was the first time I had heard the term, yet I knew exactly what he meant.

  Someone was clutching my right hand; it was Sorel. She was still dead. I was lying on the gurney; it rocked on its wheels as I struggled to sit up.