Winkie

by Clifford Chase

  Knowing this was a day to grasp life in all its fullness, Gabrielle answered without hesitation the waiter’s call to participate in the butterfly auction. With pride I watched my lover of more than fifteen years glide out through the glass doors in her black velvet gown and stand regally at the little folding table on the patio. As I watched, tears in my eyes, Gabrielle, smiling for the crowd, reached down into one of the three large, orange jars before her, and there, brilliant against her black, honeysoaked sleeve as it reemerged from the earthenware: a cunningly gorgeous butterfly.

  She did so again and again, and each time a new iridescent creature appeared on her sleeve, attracted by the honey and the velvet. Its wings flapped gently—intricate blue against flame orange; or gold surrounded by smooth white; or chartreuse with scarlet on black. I broke down then because, even on that day when persecution and imprisonment seemed to have triumphed once and for all, I knew that now was indeed a turning point for the better—which would, soon enough, change for the worse once more, perhaps unimaginably worse, and later, for the better still again, maybe even unimaginably better—over and over. Gabrielle, my dear friend, stood in the sunshine of a new century.

  Nice, 1900

  Winkie Grieving

  The even grayness of the evenly clouded sky made softness everywhere. Many of the leaves had fallen, so that the trees appeared both decimated and plushly fuzzy with little branches when seen from a distance. In tracts of dead yet impossibly yellow leaves, light glowed upward. Between the barest trees, others still not at all denuded quietly bonfired chartreuse or pale salmon or browny red.

  It had been several weeks since Baby Winkie’s disappearance. Remembering the lost child’s last brightness in the window, Winkie saw light everywhere and its myriad effects.

  A round, tangled tree of tiny crab apples seemed to have pulverized bright orange into pinpoints that the tree could then more easily disperse into the calm, gray light of the afternoon forest. Every bush and branch seemed to be getting rid of something, namely the light of each painfully dazzling leaf or berry, which registered on the eye as if on a Geiger counter. Before the leaves could fall, they had to give off all those penetrating rays; it was the light, not the leaves themselves, that had to be gotten rid of.

  The gray light fell from the rumply clouds but also seemed to be sopped back up into the cottonlike softness, which Winkie imagined was like his own soft stuffing. The bear had to somehow absorb and absorb the stark and lonesome facts all around him, including his own despair. He looked up into a lattice of dark gold and greenish maple leaves, whose huge branches twisted in Medusa-like but harmless poses. The tree seemed to be trying in vain and with too much fanfare to wave him off. It was like the gesture of a half-crazy person, greatly alarmed but for no apparent reason, warning him ridiculously too late that something terrible was about to happen.

  If only he hadn’t left her alone that day. She wanted to go upstream, he let her go, and then—

  Winkie walked under the autumn trees. Dull brown leaves fell around him on the path. Whereas before there had been two walking under the trees, now there was only one. Winkie walked alone under the autumn trees.

  He returned to the hermit’s cabin, where he had remained for more than a month now, watching for some sign that his child might return. The hermit was dead and Winkie had removed him. Deciding to stay reflected a choice between two evils: the forest without Baby Winkie or the cabin without Baby Winkie. Yet his instinct to remain in the terrible place where she had vanished was as fundamental as digging or burying.

  It was with a dazed curiosity, in the first moments following his child’s flight from the earth, that Winkie had ventured to examine the lifeless body of her tormentor. It lay on the floor of the cabin, whose interior no longer glowed but appeared simply as a collection of mundane particulars—wood, dust, and old cooking smells. The hermit was no longer exactly a monster. In repose he seemed almost nice—the kind of quiet, bearded old man who might feed little animals and let them sit on his shoulder. Not that Winkie would have liked that, but he could see how it might appeal to a certain kind of animal, like a chipmunk or a robin.

  It wouldn’t have appealed in the least to Baby Winkie, even if the hermit had indeed been a nice man, and this thought made the living bear wince. He pretended that he hadn’t had the thought, because he knew it was a grieving thought and he wasn’t ready to admit he had to grieve. He kicked the mad professor to make sure he really was dead. The thud was the very particular thud that only a dead thing could make.

  Winkie already knew in his heart of hearts that Baby Winkie was forever gone, but he affirmed to himself that she still might come back and, if there was any chance of her doing so, he must remove the evil hermit from sight so that the frightened child wouldn’t be scared away any longer. In a burst of anguished energy, Winkie grasped the dead man’s dirty flannel collar with his teeth and began jerkily dragging him toward the open door. The difficulty and slowness of the project made its futility apparent and so the bear began to cry, yet he knew he couldn’t give up, which only made him cry more.

  The professor’s clothing made a distinctive, short scraping-whooshing noise against the cabin’s wooden floor each time Winkie lurched him forward a few inches. It was the necessary sound of the moment. Winkie knew that he might have chosen another necessary sound, perhaps that of shredding the hermit with his teeth and spitting him out and then chewing up every last bit of the cabin and spitting that out, too. But he had decided on this course of action, dragging, and therefore this was his fate, and the dragging noise was his contribution to the awful stillness of the forest twilight in which there was now no Baby Winkie. A crow cawed somewhere. Crickets were beginning. Drag, drag, drag. Winkie could barely see through his tears but it was important to follow through. The next sound would be that of furious digging and then burying and then stamping on the earth, which would be a little like stamping on the tormentor himself. None of it would satisfy, so in this sense it didn’t matter what Winkie did, and yet in another sense this was the bear’s essential task now, to rid the world of the big dead blob that he was now rolling down the three concrete steps of the cabin.

  Early fall turned to middle fall and then late fall. Each morning Winkie would look out the dirty window at all the cute animals performing their cute activities—bunnies jumping and nibbling, squirrels rapidly and deftly finding nuts, their black eyes gleaming—and he would be overcome with an unbearable sadness.

  The problem of Baby Winkie dying—the way it seemed both possible and impossible to him. It had seemed that Baby Winkie was life itself to him—love itself—and how could that die? He sought and couldn’t find answers, just as he sought and couldn’t find Baby Winkie a hundred times each day. The limbo of lovingnot-finding, the repeated turn toward the absent one. It seemed to deepen and trouble the already uneasy limbo of Winkie’s very existence, suspended as it was between bear and toy, spirit and matter, humanity and the natural world. He no longer knew in what direction even to wish.

  One afternoon while walking in the forest, the little bear considered entering another dimension, and indeed in the sad, golden dusk slanting along the path, he soon began to flicker, turning briefly harsh and trapezoidal under the naked trees. But it hurt just as much as his own dimension, maybe more, and anyway he knew immediately that neither was this where Baby Winkie could be found. Returning to his former shape, Winkie retraced his steps to the cabin.

  The limbo of loving-not-finding

  * * *

  He should be gathering acorns for the winter, as he had done so a year before with Baby Winkie, still an infant, clinging to his back. But the hermit’s creaky shelves were stacked to the rafters with cheap canned goods, enough for the bear to get through any number of seasons. A year before, Winkie would have disdained using a can opener, but why stand on ceremony now? He let himself revert to the human ways he’d once so resolutely left behind—table and chair, soft bed, blankets, warmth, and SpaghettiOs
. As when he was a lifeless plaything, often angry and sad, Winkie lived now more like a little man than a bear. A dirty little man, that is, for he let the empty cans pile up in a corner of the cabin, he never washed the spoons or made the bed, he left all the professor’s books, clothes, guns, and papers in a mad jumble on the shelves, the floor, the table, and he let the rats and birds scamper in and out all day, leaving their droppings everywhere. He began watching the hermit’s TV late into the night—it pulled in one channel, which showed mainly ads for exercise equipment—and he slept late. He lay on the dirty, wrinkled blankets each morning, surveyed the cabin’s growing disarray, and said to himself, “Good.”

  Weeks. In the distance, the same bird. Keening. Each day Winkie went to the window and watched the last of the leaves fall.

  Then at last the leaves were all gone and the keening stopped.

  Mechanically, without thinking, Winkie began to clean. The cabin without filth and disorder would be a terrible and empty thing, he knew, but he couldn’t stop. His back hurt as he scrubbed and carried and reached and bent. In a pile of books and papers he came upon the videotapes labeled “Baby Winkie in Captivity.” He’d noticed them before, and though he realized now that he was, in fact, looking for something, these weren’t it. His child in captivity wasn’t what he wanted to see. He considered burning the tapes but decided that wasn’t right either. He climbed on a chair and shoved them onto the highest shelf, muttering, “Put away. Put away.” It was then, looking back down to steady himself, that he spotted Baby Winkie’s memoirs, a thick yellow pad stuffed between the desk and the window. He climbed down, lay over the edge of the desktop, and grasped the pad of paper in his cotton paw. The pages were cool and wrinkled with ink, and he had a dizzy sensation akin to a merry-go-round slowing as one laid hold of the brass ring.

  He pulled the papers out of their hiding place and smoothed them out carefully on the desk. He sat cross-legged before them. He began to read.

  There were dozens of stories with dozens of characters, but in each the personality of the narrator was the same. He experienced an uncanny combination of privilege, discovery, and fate. He didn’t want the journals to end. For when he turned to the last ink-scribbled page, and the butterflies were pulled one by one from the jar, he understood once again and in a new way that his own life with Baby Winkie was over. He had failed to save her. His tears fell on the lined, yellow pad.

  A blankness. Winkie gazed out the window. It was dark now and it wasn’t even raining. It was doing nothing outside.

  But it was that very night that he had the Dream: Baby Winkie floating there before him; the fluttering infinity of her gaze; “Think back”; and her fading away for good.

  Winkie really did awaken then, and he was left with the exact same sadness, bewilderment, and pride in his child as the first time she had disappeared. He realized these were now his feelings for Baby Winkie; they were final. The TV was still on, flashing especially dark and light in a sequence meant to convey excitement to the buying public. He switched it off. He saw even deeper despair as a possibility, let himself teeter awhile in the darkness. He tried to understand what his child’s words meant. He slept again and dreamed again.

  This was part 2 of the same dream. Figures of his own long life as a toy appeared to him, all the other children he’d cared for, and their two families, each waving good-bye with an excruciating combination of eyes and hands that prodded him with the keenest loss and regret. He hadn’t thought about any of them in many years—Ruth as a girl, her sister, her brother, her parents; and then, later, Ruth’s own family, the children one by one, Carol, Helen, Paul, Ken, and finally Cliff, each of whom had arrived with such loving, unflinching eyes, each of whom had grown up and left the bear behind. Yet in the dream it was Winkie leaving them behind—he was riding away from them on a huge white showboat, whose banjo band sounded down the ripples of the wide, brown green river. He was a dancing bear in spats and a white top hat, doing his act on the deck for no particular crowd, while all those people and children waved good-bye to him from the muddy shore.

  He hadn’t thought about any of them in years, and maybe that was the worst of it, that you could forget so completely what you’d lost.

  Hugs, secrets, stories, games, crayons, tinsel, gifts, tears, spankings, betrayals, doggies, nicknames, hands, nuzzling, two-plus-two, kisses, fireworks, wagons, walks. These eddied away on the flat water behind the great paddle wheel of the riverboat, which merrily went, “Toot-toot,” and rumbled in a way that was neither reassuring nor sinister, simply inevitable, beneath Winkie’s dancing feet.

  Twitching in the bed, he woke up.

  It was early morning. He went outside to relieve himself. Squatting by the stream, Winkie bitterly recalled the pleasure such simple acts once gave him. He looked around the forest that he still loved: high trees, the singing of sparrows, yellow sunlight between the hundreds of empty branches. He let his mind come to a halt and for a moment the world and its pleasures poured in once again.

  He knew now, from the second part of his dream, that by “Think back” the apparition of his child didn’t mean recent events but more distant ones. Waving good-bye from the riverboat was only the start of remembering the other children he’d known. In his new life with Baby Winkie he had never wanted to look back—there had seemed no need to think of it, his many years as a plaything—but he realized now that the long past, too, was full of love and pain and that therefore those years, too, were a part of him. Even if they were long lost.

  Continuing on his way, pondering his time before Baby Winkie, the old bear became suddenly aware of how small he was under the huge, overarching trees. He looked down at his own rounded shadow amid those of so many dormant twigs, and he wanted to cry again. It would be no consolation to trace from the beginning all the forgotten steps that had led him to this lonely place. But evidently it was his duty and so he resolved to try. He offered himself a reprieve until sundown, and then that night Winkie gave himself over to remembering his life—fitfully and in snatches at first, settling at last on that sad, happy, angry time when he was called Marie.

  His capture, of course, interrupted him, but the memories resumed on his way to jail. So it was in the middle of Ruth’s childhood, as it were, that Winkie became a prisoner. Months would pass before he turned to remembering again, on the very eve of his court date. So, too, it was in the middle of Cliff’s boyhood, as it were, that Winkie’s trial began.

  Part Three

  “And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe.”

  —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

  The People vs. Winkie

  1.

  The army general pointed with a laser pen at the poster-size photograph. “This is a satellite photograph of what we believe to be a sophisticated bioweapons laboratory where, according to scattered intelligence reports, more of these ‘killer bears’ are being created.” He moved the light in circles around one blurry rectangle and then another. “Here. Here. And here,” said the general commandingly.

  “I understand,” said the prosecutor in a hushed, worried tone. “Now, by ‘killer bears,’ you don’t mean bears in the usual sense, do you?”

  The general chuckled gravely. “No. That’s just what we call them—because of the superficial resemblance to bears.”

  “But there’s nothing warm and fuzzy about them, is there?”

  “No, indeed. On the contrary, they are nothing less than an army of supercombatants, trained to maim and kill.” The general revealed his next chart. “And created, we believe, by a scientific process we don’t yet understand, but which might well involve the use of stolen children, combined with DNA from a local animal, such as a snake or rodent or, just as likely, a drug-resistant microorganism, such as smallpox or anthrax.”

  “Here. Here. And here,” said the general commandingly.

  The chart showed a line drawing of a little girl in a pink dress on the left, a thick black arrow la
beled “DNA” in the middle, pointing to a naked Winkie-like creature on the right. The courtroom gasped.

  “Thank you, that’s all too clear,” said the prosecutor. “No further questions.”

  “So far, so, um, good,” Unwin whispered to the bear, as he riffled through a mound of overstuffed manila folders. “The jury saw, saw, saw right through all of that. Nothing to worry about, Mr. Winkie.”

  In fact, it was impossible to gauge the reaction of the jury, because the eight men and six women were hidden behind a curtain. In a key pretrial motion, the prosecution had successfully argued that, due to the extreme danger posed by the defendant’s network of terror, the identities of jury members must remain secret. Winkie gazed now with apprehension at the high, blue expanse of fabric as it billowed slightly in an indoor breeze. It seemed then as if the curtain itself were passing judgment on him—hating him for what he was accused of, ignoring him, punishing him with drapy silence.

  “Mr. Unwin?” said the judge impatiently.

  Unwin continued searching through his piles of papers, folders, and computer discs. That morning the prosecution had suddenly honored his long-standing request for the release of evidence by turning over approximately 10,000 typewritten pages and 213 compact discs. In the interest of speedy justice for a case of national significance, the defense’s plea for a continuance was denied, and the many stacks of testimony, lab reports, and other documents now surrounded the lawyer and his client like a messy nest. Unwin fluttered from stack to stack, his lank hair falling in his eyes.

  “Sir, do you intend to cross-examine this witness or not?” the judge demanded.

  There was only the scrabbling sound of the defense attorney shuffling pages.