The glass shook, halted a moment, and shook again in the gale that blew straight toward the bear and was turned away only at the last minute by that single clear shaking pane.
But if, but what, but whether, but who, but nevertheless, but insofar, but why, but otherwise, but even if—
In gusts came also terror and a hundred times he pictured that dark pane bursting at last—shards, wind, wrath, splinters, all in a swirl, lifting up the bear and swirling him away, foul, furious, above the soaking trees, the flooded lawns, the pavement and the houses and the mud, away in the terrible windy rattling dark.
But even if he was to be left alone, even if that was what had to be, the bear had hoped at least—hoped at least—hoped at least … He couldn’t grasp it—not then in the terrible room, not now, years later, in his cell—just what it was he had longed for, what he had hoped might not be lost this last time, nor why that unnameable whatever, if indeed it wasn’t lost, would somehow save this boy from what must surely be the fate of all humanity, and maybe of every other creature, too, nor why he felt that saving Cliff, whatever “saving” was, could somehow also save himself, too.
Neither cruelty chosen nor innocence flown, neither lies believed nor wishes smashed, not rage returned, not knowledge lost, neither sadness borne nor shame endured. No, none of these had he meant to save the boy from, but something bigger—what?—nothing less than the Way of the World itself, and he had hoped against all reason and experience that maybe this one time it would not have to be the Way of the World after all.
“Just this one time,” the bear said to himself, back then in the stormy dark, and now again in his too-bright cell, both to torture himself for wanting it and to want it again anyway. After all, after all. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How could the Way of the World be otherwise?
Winkie and the Way of the World. Winkie and the Way of the World. The rain pelting the glass. Winkie and the Way of the World. He stared ahead at the rain pelting the glass.
All night and in the dark, the window jiggled and creaked. It never did break.
Part Two
“Ah, if children only had the means, what different histories they would form of themselves!”
—Frederic Tuten, Tintin in the New World
Winkie on His Own
How did the bear get from his shelf in a suburban bedroom to the shack in the woods where he was arrested? The extraordinary journey began with nothing more than an idea. It was one that Winkie had had many times before, but this time he also knew he could do it.
The house seemed to hum quietly with a new expectation. No one was home. All by himself, Winkie stood up, shook the dust off his snout, sauntered down the bookshelf, and jumped to the windowsill. The softness of his feet cushioned the landing and made him bounce up and down a little. He gazed through the clear pane. The neighborhood was sunny and absolutely quiet. A new tree had been planted by the sidewalk, and its few, pale leaves flickered in the wind. An elderly man pedaled by on a giant tricycle, and then there was no one.
Winkie knew well the stories that begin, “In the old times, when it was still of some use to wish for the thing one wanted …” Now he saw that the season for wishing was new as well as old and continued to this day. He picked up a large book from the windowsill and hurled it through the glass. The crashing sound did not startle him, so fixed was his intention. He crawled out the window between the jagged pieces.
Winkie stood on the plantless weathered window box looking around, blinking in the sunlight. He hadn’t been outdoors in nearly forty years, when he was included in a puppet party on the lawn. The dimness of that memory made him doubt himself a moment. He looked down at his soft, round little bear’s paw, the one that had thrown the book. There were no fingers or claws, no muscles or ligaments, only worn fuzzy cloth and stuffing. And yet this paw had picked up the book and thrown it. “Huh.” Winkie shrugged. “There are lots of things I can do.”
He stepped off the window box onto the hedge. He shuffled around a little on the clipped, prickly branches full of dark green leaves. The prickles poked but didn’t pierce him. The hedge quivered and shivered under his cottony steps. “Huh,” he said to himself. “So this is the world.”
Sometimes in his cell, Winkie thought about this time and wondered, why, if he could come to life, couldn’t he also now grow wings or turn himself into a stronger monster that could crash through the walls? Or even the kind of monster that didn’t care.
Back in the quiet house, up on his shelf, Winkie had forgotten ever being loved. The family moved to a new state and he was placed on a new shelf. Nothing else changed. As the years went by and the dust swirled and settled and the room grew hot and cool and hot again, he had lost all hope of ever being picked up and cuddled. More years. By then he had lost hope so long before, and so completely, that at last he reached a final and transformative purity. He blinked just once, with new and terrible understanding, at the precise moment he reached this point. And in that blink—a simple falling and rising of his two glass eyes with a tandem click-click—he had exercised his new power for the first time, not even meaning to. For he had blinked all on his own, without being tipped forward or back by anyone or anything. It could almost have been an earthquake—and indeed it was that monumental in the bear’s life—but Winkie knew what earthquakes felt like, and he knew there had been no such thing.
Exhausted, afraid to think another thought, he went to sleep for several days, his eyes still wide open. Dreaming countless dreams, each forgotten as soon as it was finished, Winkie groggily began to wake. He seemed to be sitting at the bottom of a pool of clear liquid, looking up at the flickering light of the sky. But then he saw that he was in his pastel room like always, leaning against the same old book, gazing sadly down at the two blue twin beds made neatly, perfectly still. Perhaps time itself had stopped. Then Winkie’s three wishes came to him, which was the same as his knowing that they could come true.
First, he wanted to gain his freedom; second, to find something good to eat; and third, to learn to go doo-doo.
Now, out on top of the hedge, on his own for the first time, Winkie hesitated. He was frightened. From his customary perch on the shelf, he had glanced out the window longingly at this rectangle of green more times than he could count. And now, here it was, he was touching it, he was making it quiver. Colors seemed brighter. His eyes hurt. He looked up at the blue sky, down at the patchy green and yellow brown lawn, and across the street at the white, rusted pickup truck parked there. Something about the truck gave him courage. “OK,” he said. “Let’s try doing some more things.” And with an “Umf” he leapt off the hedge. He let his arms fly up at his sides in the wind and felt his terry-cloth robe flapping at his waist. His eyes blinked open and shut as he dropped.
Winkie was enjoying gravity. But it was much farther from the hedge to the lawn than it had been from the shelf to the windowsill. Winkie had thought, given all the possibilities the day had already offered, that he wouldn’t exactly fall but would glide downward to the lawn, guided evenly by the same unseen hand that had given him life and motion. But though his descent seemed to take a long time, the landing was fast and hard. Winkie tumbled over several times, coming to rest flat on his belly next to a dandelion, his stubby arms and legs outstretched.
He convulsed, gasped, found air. With a grunt he rolled himself over and looked up at the sky, which was spinning somewhere past the tip of the bright, yellow dandelion. Oxygen elated him. He felt all sorts of strange sensations throughout his plump trunk and especially in his limbs: hidden movements, tingling, minute twitchings beyond him. Winkie became keenly aware of his white terry-cloth robe, sewn for him long ago. “This isn’t me,” he said slowly, with perfect conviction. He wanted only to be naked. The thought made him struggle to his feet. The robe was his past, old and done with, and he stripped it off and threw it down on the grass, where it lay in a heap. He would have liked it to have been somehow burned away as he leapt from the house to the lawn. He
seemed to be traveling in time, whether backward to some prior, purer essence of himself, or forward to some more perfect incarnation, he didn’t know. With a dizzy pride he bent and inspected the exposed, light tan fur of his round belly, faded, patchy, and worn. “Mange,” he said with satisfaction.
Woozily he fell back on his rump and sat looking around. The world, and his place in it, amazed him. In his head he drew fantastic mathematical triangles from himself to the newly planted tree to the peak of the neighbors’ roof and back again; then to another tree with red spiny blooms or to the dull flat street or to the rusty white pickup truck perhaps and back—over and over. He saw that by the lovely, infinite, and specific combination of just such triangles, he was located in naked, ancient, mangy existence.
The world, and his place in it, amazed him.
Winkie had almost forgotten about eating, but there on the grass, several yards away under the new tree, were a dozen or so long brown pods of some kind that had fallen. Not many days before, Winkie had looked out the window and seen an old Korean man and his wife bend and pick up these very pods, gathering them into a paper grocery bag. Then they hobbled down the block, on to the next little tree, and continued gathering. Winkie hadn’t realized then that the pods were food. But now he understood: They looked delicious. Crawling delightedly on all fours, Winkie made his way down the fragrant lawn and huddled under the shade of the tree that made the pods. He picked one up, sat down, and began to gnaw on it. Quickly he broke it open and sucked on the large seed inside. It tasted like chocolate.
Soon Winkie had eaten every fat seed in every pod that had fallen under this particular tree. He peered up into the sparse new branches overhead and saw more, dangling enticingly, long and brown between small, pointy, gray green leaves. He was full but he enjoyed gazing at the minor abundance that he might climb up into if he so wanted. “They look sort of like turds,” he said to himself with satisfaction, and then he remembered his third wish for the day.
Winkie had never actually gone doo-doo before, but he had pretended to many times. Now that he had eaten, like a real animal, it should be easy. He scampered to the edge of the lawn and squatted, waiting for something to happen—as he had seen dogs of all shapes and sizes do on countless occasions. He stared intently at the blades of grass just in front of his eyes. And when in his concentration it seemed that the multitude of crisp, new blade tips had become the entire world, and there was nothing to see ever but green and grass, Winkie felt a slow yet irresistible churning deep within himself, down, down, more profound than he had ever felt before.
The sensation was heavy and slightly prickly, warm as fur, and seemed to glitter inside him. It was both gathering within him and pushing slowly and inevitably through him. It hurt but not too much. He felt some unknown inward part of himself solemnly making way. Then a small seam quietly opened, and for the first time, something that was inside him was now coming out. He shut his eyes. In the darkness the new not-quite-ecstasy flowed through him like a huge, rumbling truck in slow motion. Then it was done. Shivering once, he turned to see what he had made and beheld the brown shining mass nestled in the green. He sniffed it once and, detecting a hint of the brown pods he had just eaten, was proud. It was much better than make-believe. Then he raised on tiptoe and gazed up and down the block at all the little brownpod trees in a row, and the yellow green rectangles of lawn, one after another. He wanted to make his special mark, again and again, on each and every plot.
Nearly everyone in this neighborhood was old, and during the heat of the day they stayed safely inside their houses or emerged from their automatic garage doors already locked inside plush, womblike, air-conditioned vehicles. Winkie had eaten the pods and done his business on twenty-five lawns before he saw anyone at all. It was late afternoon and hot, and Winkie was very tired but still determined to continue his newfound activities because he didn’t know what he wanted next. The old woman made her way briskly down the sidewalk in a bright turquoise terry-cloth running suit. Winkie disdainfully paid no attention and continued peeling the layers from an especially juicy-looking pod. The turquoise figure advanced in the corner of his eye, the fresh cloth swishing loudly. “She really should take that off,” Winkie said to himself contentedly, remembering with pleasure his own liberation from clothing just a few hours before.
The large chocolaty seed had just come loose and slipped onto his tongue when Winkie realized the old woman hadn’t passed by him but was standing there, a few yards down the sidewalk, staring at him. Winkie turned and glared back angrily with his wide, medium brown eyes.
“What a, what a, what a cute, cute little, little,” the woman cooed. Winkie was stirred immeasurably by her high singsong, which seemed a voice older than time itself. Her hair was bright white behind a thick turquoise band, and her face was as tan and old as Winkie’s own. She peered at him through big, thick glasses. She didn’t seem to see very well. “What kind of little-little booboo are you?” She began tisking and holding out her hand enticingly as if offering food. “Are you a little itty pet-pet? Baby pet? Now, who’d let such a cute, cute little boo-boo like you get out?”
Winkie felt keenly and painfully torn between two worlds, the human and the animal. The woman’s crooning seemed to be pulling him backward. Forgotten memories of cribs and dolls and hugs and little cheeks crowded around his angry, staring eyes. He dropped his seedpod.
“What are you, what are you?” she sang, a white-haired siren. She was kneeling now on the grass, trying to see what Winkie was. “Who does a little furry-furry boo-boo belong to? Does a little furry-furry need a home-home?”
And even though Winkie knew exactly what he was, and what he was doing at that moment, and though he understood these facts in a way he never had before, he was filled with doubt and loneliness. He had gotten his three wishes and now what? He still belonged to no one. “Baby, baby, boo-boo?” cooed the voice. “What kind of baby boo-boo is it, now?” Winkie wanted to touch the bright white hair and nuzzle the tanned wrinkled face that resembled his own. Her milk blue eyes blinked behind the blurry glasses. Winkie understood that if she came too near, she would see he was neither quite beast nor toy but something frightening and strange that had never been seen before in the world—a protean creature always in the midst of change, ugly, self-invented, stitched together from the body and spirit and will that he’d been given.
The old woman edged forward cautiously on her knees, still crooning and tisking in her high singsong, and Winkie’s fear or grief or anger boiled over: Involuntarily, he let out a series of high yelps like maniac laughter. He had never made nor heard such sounds before—but here they were:
“Heenh! Heenh! Heenh!”
The old woman jumped back in alarm. Winkie didn’t move but kept staring, and she turned and began tiptoeing carefully away. He almost wanted to call her back but it was too late. She began a hobbling panicky run, disappearing around a corner. Sadly triumphant, Winkie made the sounds again.
Compelled by his new solitary destiny, Winkie made his way that night to the forest. He had spied it from one of the little sidewalk trees, which he had climbed to find out if the pods that dangled tasted different from the ones that lay on the ground. In this way he had hoped to distract himself from the memory of the enticing old woman. Hanging on to a branch, munching without much interest, he looked through the leaves and saw, above the red-tiled roof of a pink house, the faintest tip of a blue, wooded peak. The sun had dropped behind it, and the mountain looked cool and peaceful beneath a perfectly clear, even, yellow sky. Winkie knew that was where he had to go.
For hours he scampered from lawn to lawn, crossing one gray street after another, dodging cars, hiding from dogs and children. It seemed he was getting nowhere. He had gotten his three wishes that day: Were there to be no others? “I will go live in the mountains,” he repeated to himself, half crawling and half walking, entranced. “Like a real bear.”
Winkie had been old for so long that he had surpassed being e
ither old or young. Or, in any case, he had no one to compare himself to. He had been the toy of one child and, years later, the toy of five more. Each had offered him a fresh life, a reprieve. But at last the chain had ended, and anyway, that was years and years ago. After that, Winkie had measured time in quantities of boredom. Ten little boredoms made a big boredom, and twenty big boredoms made a superboredom. After twenty or more superboredoms, he lost count. But his waiting had never become excruciating, for by then he had forgotten he was waiting for anything in particular. He lost track and thought about life. In this way he had acquired his own brand of wisdom.
It came to his aid as he made his way through neighborhood after neighborhood, thinking of that mountain peak and of the life he would have under the trees. He got bored with his journey but he didn’t give up. At last the lawns began to grow wider, and sometimes there was nothing but trees and tall grass for many strides between the low-slung sprawling houses. He began to hear strange animal sounds, mysterious calls that both beckoned and frightened him. What if the wild animals didn’t like Winkie? But even if he was to be torn to shreds by lions or tigers that very night, then that was his fate, and he would accept it.
Just then the lighted kitchen window of the last house passed out of view, and the darkness of the huge, magnificent night trees closed over Winkie’s head. He heard the sound of a creek off to the left and nosed his way toward it through thick tangled luscioussmelling underbrush.
He broke out onto a small, rocky beach, and there in the moonlight, overhung by the trees, the water flowed by in ripples. Winkie stooped to sip and then to nibble a few dusky orange berries that clustered by his head. The taste was a wave of pleasure he’d never known, like stars exploding in his mouth. A desire for sleep overcame him sweetly in the heaviness of all his limbs. Winkie had arrived. Dozing off on a little mossy boulder in the last hours of night, he knew that his wishes were many more than three, that they would continue to come to him one after the other, and that sooner or later they would each be granted.
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