The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  W^at had happened to her really?

  She had been taken up by everything in the universe that had always threatened to annihilate her, and it was wearing not only the suspect name but the immense fur coat of love. She had given in and let the pleasure blow her fear away; she had used what was left of her fear as a powerful spice, an additional delectation of this possibly lethal enjoyment. At one point she had rocked her head back, eyes closed, and had seen a spangHng millitude of stars, and they had seemed to be her familiars. It had seemed to her that they

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  knew her and knew her name, and that their geometries and Hghts were obscurely kin to her. When her conventional climax came, larger experiences were blotting her out, and although it was nice enough qua orgasm, in context it had seemed a small event occurring on her peripheries, something between an irrelevance and a sneeze. Well, perhaps not as small as that. But her limbs were shaking without it, and even before it shook her she had felt almost completely gone. She had wished to go completely, to leave any flesh and world she had ever lived in, and for a moment she'd been ready to die if necessary to effect so conclusive a departure, but it turned out not to be possible; although in fact it seemed as if the neural web within her body had been electrified and the major nodal points that stored all her crystallizations of memory and identity and prior self-perception were burning out in dazzles of undoing.

  When it was over, she found that she was still herself, however.

  In some ways, the Bear had proved a clumsy lover. Perhaps with time he could be trained.

  As if that were the point. What had surprised her, leaving aside consideration of his almost insupportable strength, was how sensitive and even gentle he could be.

  The second time had been better in most conventional respects, probably the best time she'd had with her clothes on or off in years, but it had also been inexplicably less profound. And how did she feel now? Certainly she had more than just the usual postorgasmic glow on, although by now sufficient time had passed for old demon doubts to rise up and start to tug at her. Could the Bear be trusted? Could anyone? Could she? Could anything as volatile and overmastering as sex be trusted as the basis of any kind of life with anyone? Perhaps part of what nagged at her was the humiliating intuition that her sex was the only, certainly the crucial, coin she had had to offer the Bear. If she let herself, she could feel the beginnings of shame at the thought that her gift should be limited to lying down, opening her legs and being fucked, her body the only card she had to play on the poker table of this world, a wholly brutal place once you took the wraps off and looked at it square. If so, this alleged lovemaking with the Bear was only another hideous transaction, another way of being crushed beneath the wheel and having her soul pressed out of her hke juice again. If so, it was only more of the same, only the routine breaking of one more human heart, no big deal in these regions. And if so, what was the point?

  She couldn't, she shouldn't, lying here in the stars and blindness of her anchors, give in to this much fear. Didn't she hope for something, didn't she still possess, however deeply it was compromised, some genuine capacity for

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  love? She couldn't be alone in that. There still had to be some correspondence out in the universe somewhere, hadn't there? Some answering call? Otherwise where had her own call come from?

  So, of course, she had fricked a talking bear.

  She had no doubt that the Bear was in love with her. But he was so romantic about it, and romantic love, she knew, was a stuff that will not endure. The important question was whether or not he knew her from a hole in the wall or the hole between her legs. The question was whether or not he even sHghtly understood her. The gap between his certain love and his uncertain knowledge was the measure of the risk she was taking with her life. Now that passion had possessed them both, in all its blind imperious power, she could have no clear idea how sturdy or even existent was the rope bridge on which she was walking above that gap? canyon? chasm? pretty little valley one could make a home in? sheer cliffs of fall?

  WTiat exactly happens to you after you've fucked a talking bear? You could hardly expect to find a support group, not even in this neck of the woods. Talking Bears and the Women Who Love Them. Right after this commercial break. See? Once your mind and character are destroyed, there'll be a future for you on daytime TV. You might even get a book deal out of it. All eventualities are covered.

  She spoke her name to herself: Iris Tremoureux. It was familiar, but what had happened to that faraway person named? What had she been doing to land precisely here, in this bed, Hstening to a bear's heavy, sated breath as he slept? The urge to run was powerful but led nowhere.

  Life had landed her where she had never thought to be. And her vulnerability and special pleading in the face of general circumstance seemed suspect to her anyhow. She had never seriously lacked for food or shelter. No foreign armies, as they did elsewhere in the world on a regular basis, had tramped to her door demanding housing, dinner, daughters, cunt, then her chin pulled back and her throat held naked to the knife. What legitimate right had she, really, to feel so fearful and so desperate? What right to feel that this world was the place in which they caught and killed you if they found out who you really were? She had had it easy. But she was weak and easily deluded, end of story.

  And now, she thought, listening to the autonomic repetitions of the Bear's heavy breath, she had engaged, poor fool, with the fundamental monstrous-ness of the world, and hoped to win something from the encounter. Speaking realistically, where was the hope or possibility in that?

  She remembered thrusting her face ecstatically into his fur, its rich scent filling her.

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  I know an old lady who swallowed a fly, perhaps she'll die.

  I know an old lady who swallowed a horse, she's dead of course.

  Well, here I am and that's the end of everything I know.

  After watching Iris sleep awhile, the Bear eased himself with infinite tact out of bed and headed for the bathroom, but once his feet found the floorboards the call of the wild mingled with the call of nature and he found himself standing on the doorstep of his porch taking in the view like a man of property surveying his eminent domain. All he lacked were pockets into which to thrust proprietary paws.

  The wind soughed and woughed in the higher strata of the ranked guardian pines.

  The mist had lifted, and behind him, over the mountain, clouds must have parted: past the sentinel bars of the pine trunks ahead he could see moonlight silvering the meadow on the other side of the road. In the precious-metal shine he could even make out the stand of young birches on the far side of the pasture. A wind was blowing there too: the birches' young leaves were fluttering in an untellable multiplicity of detail, although the essential sum of their language seemed indisputably to be praise. What a night. So quiet, and the vocalist so subtle.

  What was happening in him really?

  Aside from his entirely satisfactory sense of sexual satisfaction and his preposterous imitation of the landed gentry—certainly he felt better settled in his body, found it, for the first time in ages, a viable, maybe even advantageous object to spend a life in—he was feeling . . . what exactly?

  Somewhere in the nave of his ribcage, the transepts of his arms, or the towers of his sight, an unreachable event had taken place, too small or subtle for his grasping, too important for him not to try. But only echoes of it reached him amid the columns, above the altar, beside the font. In this sudden largesse of his inner space it was impossible to trace these echoes to their source. It was an unseizable mustard seed of the beginning of something, but since he could not reach it neither could he be sure if it was there at all.

  Better anyway not to soil it with his attempted touch. Right?

  The Bear stood at the doorstep of his new house, allowing himself to appreciate the enlargement and deepening of his world by the reappearance of sex in it, or was the right
word love.

  Is it still possible? Can something out there still respond to one's essential call? Can such fruit ripen through its necessary evolutions and fall to you in its season?

  It was a heck of a way to run a world.

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  For a long time, desire had seemed to exist only in order to be frustrated. Had the rules of engagement really changed?

  And for the moment, was it the call of the wild or only the sound of the wind? Or only the urgings of his newfound sense of property.

  The Bear thumped down the stairs, stepped across the slithery carpet of pine needles and into the trees. Looking both ways first, he reHeved himself against a treetrunk. His urine smelled particularly strong to him, the liquid soaking through the weave of needles into the earth but its steam rising through the open air and the smell of dried sex into his quivering nostrils. That oughta make the local raccoons a little nervous for awhile.

  When he was done, he shook his member dry of its last drops, leaned his big head back and looked into the black aproning branches above: a detailed and inscrutable darkness in which the voice of God hummed and hushed.

  My trees. Hah.

  What had Stanlynn called them?

  Blue spruce? Greater hemlocks? Douglas fir?

  Well, naming things was pretty much beside the point by now.

  pai*l tout*

  Reality being too thorny for my great personality^ I found myself nevertheless at my lady^s house ^ as a large blue-grey bi7'd soaring towaj^d the moldings of the ceiling and dragging my wing in evening^s shadow.

  I became, at the foot of the baldachin supporting her adored jewels and her physical masterpieces, a big bear with violet gums and fur grey with grief my eyes on the cut glass and silver of the consoles.

  All became shadow and glowing aquarium.

  — Rimbaud

  4'

  ((

  Ilic Bear batted his nose against the bluebells—^well there were tiny blue things, delicate white things, some tiny-tongued flower a bit more lyrical in modulating shades of purple, and elsewhere, in greater shadow, magically distributed throughout a chest-high hedge of dusty darkgreen leaves, there were little orange mini-cornucopias hanging from stems attached to their middles, and the Bear ate a few—some kind of wildflowers anyway—and cantered uphill through the meadow. Just before he hit the edge of the forest he bit off a mouthful of young green grass, chewed it thoroughly, and allowed himself to drool its juices out the sides of his mouth like a wild thing before swinging his heavy head upslope and into the shade of the trees. W^igh. It was a dehcious experience and he allowed his brain to blur and thicken with it.

  After he crashed through twenty feet or so of underbrush, setting loose a racket of birdhfe in the treetops, wings clapping off to the hope of peace elsewhere, he allowed himself the luxury of a good long scratch, his back against a rough old wonderful tree and came away from it with bits of bark in his fur and a rich brown fog of wooddust rising around him in the mixed beams of light and shade.

  Oh yeah, this was the life all right all right.

  Studiously, he Hcked the fur smooth on his forearms, just for the pleasure of doing something atavistic, and to finish off the gesture smelled the leathery palms of his paws for a long minute as if he might find something really interesting and informative in their mix of tangs and scents. Fuck, he thought, I'm enjoying this. Which just goes to show you, mutation ain't everything. Not by a long shot, no. Roots are cool too.

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  He stuck his nose into the wind and sniffed deeply. His nostrils quivered volumes of fresh air and sweet decay to his lungs: moss and moldering earth, a continuous undercurrent of insect Hfe, the green difference between the smell of treeleaves and the lolHng ferns that found sufficient reason for being in the medallion Hght that dappled down to the ground through the cover of the oaks and maples. He smelled raccoon and, his mouth suddenly watering, a doe that had come that way and lingered awhile, chewing ferns and pissing there the day before. Oh man, could I? Should I? The Bear doubted he could eat raw meat again, much less tear mouthfuls of it bleeding from a carcass he'd just pulled down . . . but if he did take one he could heft it back home and into the kitchen, cut it up so it'd look cidlized, more or less. He doubted Iris would consent to cook it, even if he did the butchering himself, but she wouldn't be back for a week and in the meantime he could feast on venison. Ve?iiso?i.

  Saliva burgeoned but a shadow crossed his mind: one of the forms in which he had loved Iris—caressing her nakedness and finding implicit in her a host of the world's other beauties, running his paws down her flanks and feehng her muscles tremble beneath his touch—was as a doe, her back mottled by sunlight in woods not unlike those in which he now stood. Probably not a good idea to start killing deer, then. He thought of the blood pulsing thick through arteries in their long lightly furred throats, then suppressed the image in the interest of peace between the species, in which he had acquired a sudden, urgent interest.

  He turned to the roughbarked tree which had scratched his back's mortal itch so nicely, bared his claws and experimentally stripped off a piece of bark about the size of a hcense plate, and there it was on the paler wood beneath: look at all that buglife, see it run: one big black ant, pale white crawly things scurrying for cover, tring to burrow under the nearest edge of bark. Grubs. Now there was something he was not gonna eat aminore. He hadn't entirely wasted his time out there in the human world. 0?! s'apprend le bon gout after all. Although Lauren Hutton had made a show of eating termites in Africa, there were limits.

  The Bear took off uphill again, enjopng the way his body worked as he loped, the energy of his forepaws' dangle, and when they landed their grasp of earth transmitted smoothly down his spine to where his hindlegs picked up the wave and pushed off full of power. Just for the hell of it he did a short burst of speed and felt like the king of the world, prenyl much. I mean, who could compete? Name me someone. Go ahead. Try.

  Of course the Bear realized that if he didn't have a woman in tow he wouldn't need a house at all. He wouldn't have to sweat Stanlynn's fifteen

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  hundred a month for one thing not to mention the utiUty bills on top. And the other morning before she left for the city, Iris had said something about how if they were really going to live there they'd have to buy a car and he said How about if vou pay for it and she said Perhaps we ought to share. See, without all that he could den up here in the woods with his saxophone and a handful of books, and his record company advance would last him more or less forever. Now that would be the life.

  \buldn't it?

  The Bear paused for a moment in some leafmeal shade and considered Iris under the aspect of "a woman in tow." Touching phrase there. What an advanced brain you have, grandma. All the better to take you for granted with, my dear.

  Sounds like a monster movie.

  It is a monster movie.

  If you ever hurt that woman you will never forgive yourself and you know it. Your spirit will haunt you with ghosts of rightful accusation until the dying fall of the last note of the final cadence of the unknown composition that is you really—I wonder what chord you'll resolve on, under what sky—and it won't end there either. Don't harm a hair, don't impede a single one of her breaths or so much as bruise the body of her leastmost, slender wish. Don't, or you will pay for it untellably and forever.

  I know it. I may be stupid but I'm not dumb. She is more treasure than you will ever encounter elsewhere and for the moment the world has given her into your care. Try to be equal just for once to so sacred a degree of trust.

  The Bear shook his head. It amazed him how, whichsoever way you turned, life kept catching you in its paw. Live solo, den up with Jones, stay clear of showbiz or tangle with it and expose yourself onstage; or finally, take a real live piece of the world's breathing beauty in your arms, and love it so wholly you plunge your dick, your tongue and the breaking flo
od of your pilgrim soul into it . . . and there you jolly well are, ahn't you, signed onto the farce of identity for another full tour of duty and the unknowable pouring in on you from all sides. It never stops, does it?

  In any case, it was a long time since he'd had a good long romp in the woods. Come to that, it had been a long time since he'd had a decent run on all fours. It'd be foolish to spoil the simple pleasures of the day by too much thinking on it.

  And there it was—omnipresent self-contradiction—the Bear was swept by a wave of love or longing for Iris for the sake of whom he would have traded the rest of life in a twinkling and counted himself lucky in the bargain.

  That's the kind of critter you are. Learn to live with it.

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  The Bear took another good whiff of wind and took off again up the mountain.

  He topped it, saw another hill he might like to investigate, peered down into the three available valleys branching below, treetops everywhere and the smell of fresh water at the bottom, and only then did he notice that the specific lay of the land looked unfamiliar. He wondered for a moment if he knew where he was. In the middle of his day's journey, the woods were hardly dark, though evening eventually would come.

  Wuf. He was a bear, remember? Did the onset of evening, did the ultimate indigo pitch of this world's darkest night, matter to him a tittle or a jot? How could it possibly?

  Going easy but obeying a sense of insecurity he knew he should pay no mind to, the Bear ambled downhill in the direction of the nearest sure thing—a brook beside a road must run somewhere, and he'd follow it down-slope to Route 212 and home—and when he got to the bottom of the valley found it wasn't a sure thing at all, just a dry unimproved gully between hills, and no road in it either. Where had the water-smell come fi*om then? Someone's garden sprinkler? From his next ascended eminence he decided that all these mountains looked pretty much alike, and since he couldn't see the fire tower on the top of Overlook from where he was, in effect they were alike. Put it simply, he was lost.