The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  The Bear Comes Home 119

  his lips in this place, although he wondered if he thought of her so little in order not to go mad or because he was so self-absorbed by now that even she didn't count for much. "This has the suspect flavor of introjected cruelty."

  "You think so?" asked the Bear, leaning back against the bars and listening to the doctor's uselessly deep voice, whose accent the Bear hardly noticed now.

  "It is natural in artists for there to be a certain tyrannism of the ego. Even Chekhov vouldn't let his sister marry. Vanted her to look after him in tuberculosis. Tyrants, monsters all, zerefore normal and to be forgiven."

  "You only say that because you played the devil and lost."

  "Irrelevant," said Friedmann. "You suffer from unreasonable perfectionism and haf begun to consider yourself a monster for reasons completely normal."

  "Look at me, old man. What's normal here? What kind of story are you making up? What kind of hackney are you trying to hitch me to? I'm getting sick of our interesting httle talks."

  "Normal resistance," said Friedmann, knocking his pipe clean against the edge of the table and groping for his pouch, entirely the analyst now. It diminished him, thought the Bear.

  "Either help get me out of here or go away."

  "At the moment," Friedmann told him, "you are an administrative error, a thing forgotten and I think best so. Do you know what they had planned for you? If you died, an unmarked grave, like Mozart's. If you damaged and they decide not to kill you, then lobotomy and a cage at the zoo. All this is still possible. You are living the best option."

  "Lucky me."

  "Sink about it."

  "I've sunk enough."

  Had he, though? Perhaps he hadn't touched bottom yet. Who's to say? Odd, in any case, to speak up now. Fallen so far into inability and silence, making it his home. Wwww. Did he still recognize the authority of what had sent him here, or was it possible that he was done?

  Not yet, an inner voice told him.

  What do you know about it, he told it back.

  Silence, then more dark. He went to sleep in it.

  "How about a codpiece, man?"

  What ho, it was Tim in the morning, carrying a couple of plastic shopping bags smelling of fish that was not entirely fresh.

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  The Bear was waking slowly. Dream of Jones last night. Jones, dio piccin delta piccina terra, had been wearing feathers and flapping his arms. There had been flashes of light and Jones had begun to sing, and much to the Bear's surprise he had sung in tune. So it was a happy dream. How come the Bear's main feeling had been that Jones needed his help, needed it badly? How come, too, that in the dream's fallaway it had been Iris who stood clear in his mind, calm and self-aware in her own delicate light? Don't think of her. It'll tear your heart to pieces if you do. Too much beauty. Too much hope, and too much of that hope suspect. "Give me a minute," he told Tim.

  "Hey here I am," said the big affable guard, "loaded down with fish and fruit and you're all jeez what a grouch."

  "They still drug me," the Bear reminded his keeper. "My head's not right. A minute. A sec. Be right with you. Don't go 'way."

  ^^Viiss^" Friedmann's voice rumbling up out of a cavernous sleep next door. Apparently he had spent the night again. In any case he was huffing and puffing himself awake, clearing his nose, working an angry finger into one of his ears.

  The Bear thought: world too heavy, brain not lift it anymore. He had woken up once around dawn. Had noticed dawnlight in the slant of windows, then gone back to sleep. It was then he'd dreamt of Jones, or had it been earlier, during the night? Bear didn't know. Tim's fish smelled, how did it smell, good? bad? It was getting harder to tell. His eyes registered a subtle freshening in the available daylight. "Is it spring out there?"

  "Has been, technically, a coupla weeks already," said Tim, "but it's only now the weather's changing so you can feel it."

  "The daylight looks different."

  "It's a clear one out there, yeah, and there's a kinda softness in the air, now you mention it."

  "Mine head," came Friedmann's voice, still clogged.

  The Bear sat up on the edge of his bed and scratched his balls. "I don't know about that fish, Tim, but I could start with an apple. Brought any?"

  "Does the Pope shit in the woods?"

  The Bear, his eyes squeezed shut as he yawned again, heard a rustling of plastic bags. Then the crisp smell of fruit came to him. Oh man.

  "Granny Smiths," said Tim, "and not bad. Had a couple myself." Tim started passing small apples one by one through the bars. They landed on the blankets at the foot of the Bear's bed, plop plop plop. "Have a ball."

  "Knock myself out."

  "Vhat day of the veek?" asked Friedmann, sitting up, ruffling his stray white wires of hair and groping on the table for his specs.

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  "Same as usual," said the Bear. He took an apple, turned it in his paw, admiring the blush that must have faced south on the branch, thinking of the breezes that must have cooled it, swayed it, then popped it into his mouth whole. Juices ran and he chomped it up and swallowed it down. "Oh man, these are good." He put two more in his mouth and chewed, letting foam and juice run out the sides of his jaws for the pleasure of it. Abundance. Sweetness. World without end.

  "You eat 'em cores and all," Tim was saying, his big head shaking appreciatively left to right.

  "Leave nothing out of your experience of life is my motto," the Bear told him. "WTiat else would I be doing in this godforsaken slammer? Do the circuit. Harrow the lower realms. Get harrowed in return. Always say please and thank you. You got any more apples in that bag?"

  "What about the fish?"

  "Smells a little fiinny. Not bad, just funny, and these apples—I can feel vitamins pouring into me—has it ever occurred to you, Tim, how gratuitous and beautiful fruit is, nodding on a branch in the air?"

  "People work to grow 'em, and usually I buy 'em in the store, where people have to work too, but yeah, sure, I know what you mean."

  "So let's have the rest, I have a sudden thirst for fruit. Morning, doc," said the Bear to Friedmann as Tim began letting the remaining apples through the bars. "If apples go over the rainbow," the Bear asked the doctor, "why can't I? Can you tell me that? Only Art Pepper ever did anything with those changes."

  "You are being obscure," Friedmann told him.

  "My pohcy always." He took another apple in and quickly made pulp of it, then let it slide down his gullet like a song. "Hey, you two."

  "What," they said more or less in unison. Must work on this ensemble shit, get it right.

  "WTiat say you get your four balls together and turn the key today? I'll take it from there, deal with the gunners up the hall or be dealt with. Haven't you noticed the change of season? I know I'm acting a httle manic, but my blood's up, sap's rising. Whaddayou say?"

  "Hey man," said Tim, "we been through this before."

  "Hey, sympathetic soul," the Bear repHed, "what are you waiting for, the angel Moroni to come down and tell you special?"

  Tim reached under his uniform jacket and pulled out a pocket watch on the end of a chain. "I'm waiting for this silver watch to turn gold. I got a wife that probly needs another kidney operation and two daughters drawing a bead on college."

  "Gimme the fish you useless motherfucker."

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  Tim turned a supplicatory face to Friedmann. "Can you explain it to him again? We can't get you out of here even if we are your only friends."

  "You're not, actually," said the Bear correctly.

  "There is one epple you did not eat," said Friedmann, casting an eye down upon a fold of brown army blanket. "If you don't mind, it vould freshen my breaths."

  "By all means," said the Bear, passing him the apple. "By all means cover up the inconvenient smell of internal rot, failed will, suspect sentiment. Tim, the fish. I thought I asked you to get me a whole one."

  Tim held up the
long white filet of cod. "It was all I could get, okay?"

  "Story of your fife. Give it."

  Tim passed it slickly between the bars, grimacing. "What's got into you today?" Tim asked him.

  "I got into me today. And now this fine if questionable-smelling filet of cod will get into me today. Observe the result." He took a chomp from the thick end of the filet, which, he estimated, weighed five or six pounds in all, had not spoiled but wasn't as fi-esh as he would have liked. Good Christ, he thought, and took another large helping, it had been a no more than normally innocent creature patrolling the deeps earlier that week. He swallowed more of it down. You ate others too. How it is down here.

  "How was it?" Tim asked him. "Good?"

  "Just watch." The Bear stood up. He thrust his muzzle between the bars, fixed Tim with a look between the eyes, convulsed his stomach and began to vomit.

  "Jesus Christ!" Tim jumped back, but did not escape being stained.

  "Like a hydrant," said the Bear, feeling his life inverting itself inside him—this was not just the revulsion of his gut against current circumstance or dicey fish but a reversal, fike an umbrella turned inside out by wind, of his prior images of himself, idols all, whatever their aesthetics and geometry. He turned toward Friedmann but decided no, swung back and let the rest of it go into the lidless toilet. When he raised his head he saw that Friedmann looked as horrified as if the Bear had let loose on him literally. Intelligent man, thought the Bear, who can read the book of things in the short version. "I believe I have expressed myself correctly," the Bear told him.

  Friedmann nodded, and Tim looked understandably appalled, but the Bear could see that one more straw was still needed to break the camelback of his imprisonment. There would be no big news today.

  Friedmann's face had gone unhealthily red, and had begun to flicker like a dysfunctional video picture.

  "Wait a minute," said the Bear, "don't you cheap me out with your

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  promised fucking heart attack," and the Bear's perception seemed to spHt in three. In one version, Friedmann clutched his chest and tumbled to his bed under the punch of an attack, and in a rather sentimentally conceived tableau the doctor died holding on to the Bear's paw, panting convulsively and alternating last wishes with childhood reminiscence and words about his wife, with the Bear promising to conduct him through the veils to his best, most appropriate home. In the second, more plausible segment of perceptible event, life went on, after the Bear's eruption, much as it had for months now, Tim ineffectively wiping himself off and saying something about the roach-infested staff washroom and the stinking utility sponge, the doctor making inefficient consohng sounds, and the Bear submitting to the unjust authority of his continued enclosure. In the third version, however, and the Bear was nearly at a loss to determine which of the three was actually taking place, he not only rushed the bars to get a grip on Tim and put a murderous paw to his lying throat, but in the ambiguous daylight coming through the gridded windows the Bear got to see all the consequences of his attempted violence: other guards rushing up the corridor festooned with ordnance, the mortal sting of the tranquilizer dart, the annihilating jab of the cattle prod, and yet another descent into the riotous, wrong kind of dark, and perhaps prosaic death as punishment at last.

  In this superabundance of imagery, all that the Bear could find to ask was: given such a wealth of travesty, none of it up to expressing his reality or anyone else's, was it worth waking up dressed in any kind of self, if that was how you had to do it, on a fine spring morning in this world or any other? Was the project worth the weight and labor? And what, if any, was the issue?

  f*«gci*« I told you this before," said Iris to her supervisor, once her colleague. "I can't do the data concordance this afternoon but I'm perfectly willing to stay up late in order to do it at home and bring it in tomorrow."

  Roger cleared his throat and sat with an increasingly male proprietary air on the edge of her desk. "Because you have to visit a sick friend."

  "That's right," Iris said, "and I can bring the work in tomorrow morning, or, if you like, modem it to the database when I'm done tonight so that it will

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  be there for you to access at home after your morning jog. That's at seven a.m. I beheve?"

  Roger the Jogger removed his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose to demonstrate frustrated patience, and inchned toward her over the surface of the desk. In the shght redness of his face and the condescending embers that burned in his eyes, he reminded Iris of her ex-husband Herb. But perhaps she was exaggerating, perhaps confusing two entirely distinct predatory personalities. "Can I trust you to get it done?" Roger asked her, and she decided that, whatever her confusion, she had not been exaggerating one bit.

  "I beg your pardon?" Iris gave him what she hoped was a modestly offended look, but she could feel her face reddening despite herself. For the moment, she hated the mobility and expressiveness of her features, which all too often gave her nowhere to hide.

  "Fine," said Jolly Rodge, "fine. I just, uh, worry about you sometimes. I sometimes feel, let's say protective."

  Iris wanted to tell him not to strain himself so much, and that he was con-ftising protectiveness with an activity in his pants, but what she managed was, "I'm sure you already have enough people to protect," a veiled reference to his wife and kids; on this veil also flickered a politely misleading short film of the laboratory and the rest of the research department, also more or less under his care. Iris counted on the mildness of her tone, as always, against the chance of outright attack.

  "All right," Roger told her, and she saw him begin to recede.

  "I can check in after lunch if you like, but after that I do have to go, if I'm to make my visit."

  Roger withdrew after an excuse me or two and another bit of marginal thrust and parry. Iris kept her hands in her lap in the shadow of the desk so as not to betray what she felt as only a slight trembling, whether of fear or rage she would not have liked to say. Rage.

  After Roger left her glassed-in little office, she gave herself a minute in which to feel offended. The job he wanted her to do was little more than skilled busywork, an interlogging of five streams of research data having to do with computer models of proposed new medical compounds and their possible interface with the known characteristics of some two hundred primary neural receptors in the brain and central nerve stem. It was work in which she might have had a creative hand only a few, let's say four or five years ago, but now . . . now let's not go into it. Too late: the door had opened and a chill wind had entered the glassine cubicle. Within a minute the rage she had felt toward Roger had turned conclusively inward upon her, and, shaken by a sense of her own frailty and by the failure of her mental and spir-

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  itual materiel, she decamped to the ladies' room, key in hand, where she hoped to find sufficient peace and quiet in which she might regroup her forces.

  She found herself fortunately alone in the wonderful world of soothing blue tiles, splashed her face with cold water from the basin, and found a mask of obvious panic looking back at her from the square of mirror set above it, although perhaps it was the draining quality of the fluorescent light that made her look so skeletal and rigid. She had installed fall-spectrum daylight tubes in her own office, but that was too much to expect here. These lights, while leaching nutrients from all who passed beneath them, exaggerated the redness of her flush and greened out the remainder of the general picture. There she was: a stricken doll: water beading on its too livid skin.

  Get a grip on yourself, please.

  Iris Tremoureux—the name described the unsteady, oddly questing voice that characterized all the male members of her family, but no, she had always had a fine, even lovely speaking voice, and her diction was excellent. The name's signification had devolved, in recent years, to the shameful disorganization of her limbs; but that was not genetic, that was accidental, she hastene
d to assure herself; that is not essentially me. Iris lived, these days, accompanied by a background music of anxiety in which the breakdown of all coherence was persistently if vaguely suggested and sometimes outright threatened. Hers was a glassine or perhaps crystalline world which, if its coordinates stayed in place most of the time, always seemed too easily susceptible of being shattered.

  Oh God you know I used to be capable of more than this.

  The delicacy and refinement of her nature that now only defined the geometry of her fear had once extended to her intellectual functions. She had been capable of keeping her world sufficiently well ordered, and, in her professional life, although she had never been ultimately ambitious, let's say, of that speech in Sweden, she had been capable of original and, it would not be too much to say, difficult and concentrated work. After the end of the marriage, which in retrospect was almost nothing, and the loss to that bastard Herb of her two irreplaceable daughters, which in retrospect filled the view from sea to shining sea, her descent through the ranks of her profession had been ticked as if by index markers on the side of a graduated glass tube, constant in its rate of fall. Level by level she had surrendered degrees of intellectual autonomy, degree by degree submitted to the demands of mere system and departed from the clear-lit landscape of independent research.

  Her defining mistake may not have been the marriage after all. Perhaps it was traceable, in a sense, to her liaison with the Bear, and to the thrilling but

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  dangerous sense of miracle and possibility it had once suggested. But what point on the continuum of that liaison had been the critical one? Perhaps if she had had the courage to step into a world of monstrosity and wonder by following her heart and becoming his lover everything would have been different? Then there would have been no Herb, no marriage. Also there would have been no Amy, no Trace, and not only her life but she herself was unimaginable without them. Therefore what? Where was she? What, apart from a bit of discarded ash after she'd been burnt up by the Bear and his appetites, might she have become? And what if anything, apart from less and less, might she become now? I'm so afraid that there is no help available from here. There is no way I can be reached in this corner, into which I have so neatly and conclusively painted myself. Just look at the quality of the brush-work. You have to admit that it was very finely done. Nemesis, I endorse your efficiency even as, helpless, I hate your intricate guts.