Winkie

by Clifford Chase

  But when Winkie woke, only a few hours later, he was stricken with a wild, tearing pain in his middle. He turned onto his belly and began to press his soft hips into the stones of the beach. All night he had dreamed decapitations, which were each the culmination of a series of actions and sensations that went forward of their own accord. He rolled over and over kicking until he was lying in dirt and leaves instead of rocks, but the pain was the same, and he began pressing himself into the earth again. It was as if the dirt itself radiated a keen excruciating suffering in warm waves, which arrived more quickly now, and his kicks were forced to follow them. It went on all morning and all afternoon. When the hot waves had reached the speed of vibration, they seemed to turn into light, there was an obliteration of vision, and Winkie felt as if all his seams would burst. The mass of pain passed through and through him and then out and out, seeming to take forever, so that inside and outside were the same. Then he fell back and it was over.

  He was all wet and began to shiver. He blinked to try to wake himself up. He wished he hadn’t eaten those berries the night before, and he turned to look at the terrible doo-doo he must have made.

  But it wasn’t doo-doo. There, nestled in the grass and leaves, was a baby Winkie.

  All those years up on the shelf, and even during these last two days spent in the wide world, Winkie had never even hoped to find another creature such as himself. But here it was, only smaller and completely helpless, with a thick coat of fresh tan fur, looking back at him. So this had been his deepest wish, all along, without his even knowing it. Like a pearl or a diamond, the baby had been forming itself, also all along, little by little from the burr of loneliness, under the light pressure of Winkie’s stuffing.

  The creek flowed by, gurgling. The small one’s drowsy eyes winked shut once, opened, and winked shut again with a metallic tandem click-click just like Winkie’s own. Blindly it opened its tiny mouth, and Winkie pressed the baby’s lips to the mangy nipple at his breast, where pearly drops of nourishing milk had already begun to seep out. The newborn went to sleep suckling.

  Just as dreams and stories take on lives of their own, so Winkie came to life. And just as every meaning gives rise to a deeper meaning, so Winkie gave birth. He held his baby in his lap and quietly took in the world: the quivering high tree branches, the fluttering of thousands of bright green star-shaped leaves. As Winkie watched, the breeze intensified, and though still quite green, two or three leaves released themselves with soft clicks and tumbled down through the branches to the ground. Winkie was understanding everything now. He glanced across the shallow water pooling and then eddying past, wish after wish, and in the same instant he realized that some final transformation, even beyond the marvel of childbirth, had taken place in him. Something had happened to his winking glass eyes. They were wet and overflowing. Drops fell. Winkie was crying.

  It was growing dark. Above, between the trees, stars were coming out. Winkie’s teardrops landed softly on the new baby’s soft furry cheek, one by one. The little baby Winkie gently woke. It looked up wondering at the cool drops’ source, into its motherfather’s moist, knowing eyes, and saw galaxies reflected.

  Remarkable Lives

  1.

  Just down the hill glossy purple berries offered themselves darkly from between the pale leaves, and without prompting, Baby Winkie quietly began pulling each laden vine toward her and plucking the blackest fruit one by one with her mouth. Satisfied that his cub was getting nourishment, Winkie too began to feed. It was an ordinary summer day.

  Yet nothing could be more extraordinary than these two creatures—Winkie, the come-to-life; and Baby Winkie, his miracle child, conceived of loneliness, longing, and newfound liberty. No human had ever caught more than a glimpse of them, and they were the only examples of their kind. That they had managed to survive the mountain winter was even more of a marvel, for Winkie had had to improvise his every animal instinct, from where to sleep to what to eat and including, most important, how to care for this perfect furry tan baby who depended on him so utterly.

  Munching tartness, Winkie kept an eye out for danger. He didn’t even know how long her childhood would last, since she was his first, but seeing that she was about half his size, he guessed she was about half grown. He began to wonder, as he often did, about what course her life would take.

  “The world and fate, the world and fate,” the trees above him seemed to sing.

  He watched her spit out a stem and pluck another berry. Even though she still depended on him, she was her own little being and always had been. For instance, she was a girl (though Winkie used the term loosely). She was curious and remarked on things such as bugs and hilltops that Winkie, the busy parent, tended to ignore. She took in the world in her own way.

  “And over there?” she asked now, done with these berries, inclining her head toward the next hill, where leaves of various kinds roiled.

  “A hill of green,” he said. It was a game they played about where they might go next, what they might find.

  “And there?” she asked, gesturing toward a grove of pine trees. “Shade and coolness.”

  If she wanted to go someplace and Winkie didn’t, the game alone used to appease her, but now she chuckled and set out with determination toward the pines.

  Winkie nodded to himself, in answer to whether he should let her go. He refrained from following too closely. An invisible tether between them: She pretended to tug on it—another running joke they had—which meant she wanted to be left alone.

  Slowing his pace, Winkie watched his child pass behind the complicated silhouette of a bush. When she was very little, and hunters with their guns came tramping through, he used to pick her up by the scruff of the neck and hurry back to the secret lair he’d concocted in a hollow tree. How she screamed! It drove Winkie nearly mad—he tried to explain—she was too young to understand.

  Now she understood but often disagreed. “That’s good,” Winkie said to himself, “it’s good to disagree.” But the mere thought of hunters made him scamper past the bush and up the tangled hill to find his cub again, who was standing now in dreamy awe below the cool, tall pines.

  Winkie breathed easier but Baby Winkie, catching sight of him, scowled to have her reverie interrupted. Winkie shrugged and half turned, feigning interest in the ferns and prickly red brown needles at his feet.

  The bear who for so many years had helped care for others’ children was now a parent himself. “A baby bear, a little baby bear,” he used to murmur to himself before she was weaned, to spur himself on as he nibbled acorns so small and hard that even the squirrels had rejected them or as he scavenged through wet trash along the roadside, in the middle of the night, while Baby Winkie slept clinging to his back. When she was old enough to walk along beside him, Winkie had tried to teach her things, most of which he had only just figured out himself.

  “This is how you do it,” he’d said only this morning, regarding how to pick the purple berries.

  “It is?” she’d answered, smiling wryly.

  “It is,” Winkie affirmed, but he was giggling.

  Ever since her eyes had first clicked open, Baby Winkie’s particular genius had been to see right through him. When Winkie had first run away, it had been his firm goal to live the life of a beast, not a plaything, apart from the wishes and constraints of humanity. He’d wanted the same for his cub, and for a time he’d almost forgotten that he’d ever worn a robe or sat in a rocking chair or pretended to sip from a miniature teacup. But somehow Baby Winkie knew better.

  Late one night when the two of them came upon a remote vacation home, Winkie showed her how to push over the trash cans and strew the contents all around the property. It wasn’t necessary to do so in order to find the spent jam jars or stale hamburger buns or whatever else might seem especially tasty, but Winkie wanted to make as big a mess as possible. It seemed to verify their brute nature, setting them apart from all houses and their inhabitants.

  “There,” he said,
licking a candy wrapper.

  “There,” Baby Winkie replied, tossing a Dixie cup over her shoulder.

  They both laughed to behold the paper plates and tinfoil and pink Kleenexes glowing in the moonlight. But just then a lone raccoon happened upon the scene and began mutely and ravenously tearing at a Styrofoam container, ignoring the stuffed bears and their snickering. Winkie needed only a single glance from his own child to realize the obvious: Truly wild things didn’t joke about their own wildness. The animal realm couldn’t encompass the two Winkies any more than could the human. They were, ever and always, something both in-between and beyond.

  And so on this warm August day, as Baby Winkie gazed upward with wonder and Winkie tried not to watch, the very soughing of the pines, the silent streaks of cloud, and the rushing of a nearby stream seemed to call to them, almost moaning, “Who are you, anyway?”

  The stillness then seemed to be waiting for an answer, with an intake of breath.

  “Winkie?” piped the little one, turning to look at him.

  “Baby Winkie,” called the other.

  “Winkie?” the one repeated.

  “Baby Winkie,” replied the other.

  It was sort of a joke and sort of not. It was their oldest game, one they’d played since the child could first speak. In this way they could spend an afternoon simply calling each other’s names, or each calling his or her own name, again and again.

  2.

  In another part of the forest there lived a mad professor who had recently become obsessed with Baby Winkie. No other human being had ever seen her—Winkie was ever vigilant, and the two of them hid at the slightest scent or sound—for Winkie, the former toy, knew well the human passion to clutch at anything so perfect and singular as his child.

  The professor had moved to his secluded forest hut several years before, and until he spied Baby Winkie, he had believed he could never love anyone or anything ever again. He spent his days making bombs, which once a month he carried to the edge of the forest and mailed to one of his enemies. Then he’d return to his hut, wearily turn on the old TV, and wait to see what happened.

  Invariably he was disappointed, for try as he might, his bombs refused to explode. The local bomb squad always had ample time to carry the package out to some faceless parking lot, run to a safe distance, and fire on it. Usually the device wouldn’t go off even then.

  No (the hermit often argued in his head), he was not merely an ersatz Unabomber. Granted, both of them had taught briefly at Berkeley and subsequently taken up residence in a remote cabin in the woods. And true, both of them hated the modern world—but then who didn’t? And of course there was the superficial similarity of sending bombs to one’s enemies. But unlike the Unabomber, this hermit had never been caught and, moreover, never would be (he told himself). Besides (he concluded), the Unabomber was a mathematician, while this professor had taught creative writing. (He was fired midsemester for certain comments he had made in the classroom in praise of Mein Kampf.)

  His subsequent crusade against college administrators and all other forms of evil had once filled his brow with heady purpose, but lately the hermit had to admit that he no longer found terrorism fulfilling. He couldn’t tell if this was because he had had so little success in the field or if he would have lost interest anyway.

  As a child he used to enjoy killing salamanders and other small creatures easily caught. Hoping to revive youthful enthusiasms, he began directing more of his jittery attention toward hunting and fishing. He called this “Living off the Land,” meaning not so much the lost arts of angling or marksmanship (for which he possessed no aptitude) but an elusive feeling of oneness with his natural surroundings—“Really living it!” he liked to say to himself, as he aimed his rifle or set his traps. Often the animals outsmarted him (which killed the feeling), so being an intellectual he vowed to learn more about them. To this end he built a complicated blind even deeper in the forest, from which he could observe birds and mammals for long periods without being detected. He recorded hundreds of minidiscs of them, each of which he labeled “Living off the Land.” Though he chided himself that the DVD was a modern convenience, he argued back that it was potentially an effective means of getting his message out, for instance, on his own TV show. Usually this thought depressed him. Just what was his message? As the hermit berated himself exactly forty-seven times a day (once for each year of his life), he had never really come up with one. Despite thousands of pages of notes in the neatest handwriting, the manifesto itself eluded him.

  Into this fevered uncertainty entered Baby Winkie.

  It was a hazy day overhung by clouds, and the little bears were making their way along the brook’s edge, frowning and not speaking, because Baby Winkie had wanted to continue eating olallie berries, while Winkie was of the firm opinion that any more of them today would make her sick. They were now seeking wild rosehips, but Baby Winkie did so only reluctantly.

  The hermit heard a rustle to his right, and he peered out of his blind to behold two of the strangest creatures he’d ever encountered.

  They looked like bears, but not like any he’d ever seen either in life or on television. They were no bigger than two small infants, and one was even tinier than the other. Sometimes they sauntered upright like dwarf human beings, deftly grasping the reddest rosehips with their forepaws. Sometimes they crawled on all fours and hungrily plucked the fruit with their mouths like common animals. Their brown eyes opened and shut with a click-click of satisfaction each time they swallowed. More curious, these eyes appeared to be composed of metal or glass, and the pads of the bears’ paws looked to be faded cotton—he could see coarse stitching around the edges.

  It cannot be overestimated, the effect of an actual marvel on a mind already unhinged by delusion. The professor watched as the two whatevers continued intently searching through the thorny bushes, like fugitive wishes in the foliage of a nightmare. Observing them filled the hermit with a fine, untenable sensation of forgotten yearning. He wanted to cry out, “Here I am!” from his secret place, like the smallest child in a game of hide-and-seek as he spies his older brother pass by unseeing. Then, to his even greater surprise, the smaller one of the two, the beautiful and perfect one, began to sing:

  “Happy talk

  Keep talkin’ happy talk

  Talk about things you’d like to do.”

  Like fugitive wishes in the foliage of a nightmare

  The professor nearly fell back in his blind. The creature’s voice was as high and mellifluous as a tiny oboe.

  “You gotta have a dream

  If you don’t have a dream

  How you gonna have a dream come true?”

  When she had finished, the larger, mangy one’s laughter sounded uncannily sophisticated—he could have been a department head at a cocktail party, and for a moment the professor thought the two creatures were mocking him. Had they known he was there all along? Were they putting on some kind of ridiculous show and laughing at his expense? Or worse, were the two creatures themselves some kind of cruel hoax—robots or holograms sent to drive him mad?

  But then each of the bear-likes simply moved on to the next vine, and they appeared so innocent and unconcerned as they nibbled that the hermit was reassured. They did look to be genuine animals, despite their profound oddness; and no, they must not have detected him.

  The two were quiet again, intent on the berries. Above, in the high crisscrossing branches, the breeze increased a moment and subsided into seemingly infinite silence.

  “Winkie?” chirped the smaller one.

  “Baby Winkie?” answered the other.

  “Winkie?” repeated the one.

  And as the other replied, the professor, too, mouthed the words Baby Winkie to himself. Indeed, it seemed to him that no more perfect name could have been given her. He nodded to himself, trying to steady his mind, but he was growing giddier by the instant. He told himself he was experiencing simply the thrill of scientific discovery, but it was m
ore than that. As he continued to watch, the astonishing little being craned upward, and a patch of sun caught the golden tan of her intoxicatingly dense, short fur.

  The hermit was dazzled. His face and arms exploded with a mist of the tiniest goose bumps—as if his own skin were suddenly furred, covered with millions of subtle and intricate follicles like velvet. He thought his heart might give out. Never had he wanted to possess anything so much in his life. Was it a hallucination? No, he knew he was truly witnessing something both extraordinary and real, and, not knowing what else to think, he told himself the sight had been granted him because of the mission he had undertaken here in the woods. This is the sort of thing everyone would see, he thought, if only they’d get back to the land. He switched on the camcorder.

  At the click, the two creatures bounded away.

  “Fuck!” The professor’s cry echoed through the empty woods.

  The camera caught only a rustle of leaves, which back at his cabin the hermit watched repeatedly, hypnotized. When he could bear it no longer, he set to work constructing several more observation blinds and waited in each for this rarest one, Baby Winkie, to appear again. But the crafty little bears were extra cautious and deftly avoided all of the professor’s haunts. As the days and weeks passed without a sign of Baby Winkie, the hermit grew ever more agitated. His heart grew weak from its racing. He left off making bombs altogether and turned the full force of his madness upon the little pet he wanted for his own. How, how, how, he asked, could he relieve this terrible longing? Crouched behind his tangle of sticks, stroking his beard, he wrote neatly in his notebook: “Baby Winkie—Some Preliminary Notes.”