by Rafi Zabor
Jones hit the street, too bright, too full of fumes, cars, trucks, buses, people, noise, pain. So much sun, so little hght.
Was New York really the condition of civilization these days? New York isn't a city, it's a warehouse for people.
This, he reaHzed, is how powerless people think: it's how I think.
Thirty-seven five. It seemed like a lot to him and might pass muster with Madam.
Jones put his sunglasses on and the street grew easier on his eyes, its lights and shades assuming a marginally less lethal glare. Still, the place was improbably cruel for a prosperous city in peacetime. It's an expensive and ugly mistake.
Yeah yeah yeah, sing the old songs. Join the ghost dance. The buffalo are coming back. The bullets can't hurt you. Write if you find work.
What am I looking for, applause? If so, from whom?
He'd take the train downtown, get to the apartment about half an hour before Sybil, take his jacket off, loosen his tie, have a couple of calming whiskeys over ice—something new, this shift from hops to malt; it went with the change of costume—and talk the Megaton offer over with her when she got home. After awhile, she'd cup his balls Hghdy in her hand through the cool linen-cotton blend, and stick the smallest pink tip of tongue out between her lips. Then they'd whip their clothes off, fall down someplace soft and froth like lunatics for an hour or so, including intermissions. Human Hfe at last.
And hey, he thought, checking his watch a second time, I'll be hitting the subway ahead of rush hour. He remembered being worse off than this. So it was partly as a gesture of soul-to-soul solidarity but also because he always did it anyway, that when the beggar sitting on the sidewalk one block south of Megaton in his smudge of old clothes put his hand out, Jones emptied his pocket of change for the guy, made eye contact and asked him, "How you doing, man?"
The guy, loose-jawed, mostly toothless, unshaven, swept the buck-fifty and a token into his pants before looking up to speak. "How am I doing} How the fuck do you think I'm doing?" It was too loud, thought Jones. Mental patient. No proportion. "You must be some kind oi asshole to ask me how the
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fuck rm doing. Hey!" he announced to passersby, and some of them turned to hear him. "This asshole wants to know how I'm doingV
"See you, man," said Jones, and started sHding off downtown.
"You're seeing me now!" Oh no, the guy was scrambHng, was actually shambling himself to his feet. "You're seeing me now, maanr He flung out an arm, five dirty fingers trembling indicatively at Jones. The guy's fly was open too but at least nothing was hanging.
Jones took off at a canter, people staring at him as he ran, the guy screaming obscenities and insults in his wake. And then of course the guy took off after him—it was Hke being chased by an inkblot he himself had extruded fike a panicked squid. Jones feared that the man would cling to him forever, but he got loose after dodging through the crowd for two blocks and turning a corner into the relative emptiness of a sidestreet. He'd cut out of sunlight and away ft'om the subway line he wanted, but he seemed to be free.
Jones got his hankie out of his pocket and swabbed his face down and caught his breath before he could slink off, in clothes that seemed to fit him even less well than before—hitched up here, pulled down there, tangled in his crotch—in what he hoped was the right direction, through falling ash, in a city whose avenues, before and behind, were groaning with the end of day, amid deepening shades.
Iris jumped every time the phone rang and didn't know whether to let her machine screen the calls or pick the thing up and say hello. She already had three prospective sublessees for her apartment, but calls kept coming in. The last caller had hung up when her answering machine came on. No blame. She didn't like the sound of her voice either. Melodious, polite, and utterly false. I'm not in right now. I'd hang up on it too.
She sat in the armchair next to the instrument, rolled herself a cigarette and lit it while the day's declining beam slanted into her living room through the blinds and drew a ladder on the opposite wall. It wasn't a bad apartment. Subletting it is illegal and could cost me my lease. So why not just stay?
She had hoped to be able to sublet without running an ad in the paper, but her application for a leave of absence and a casual word around the lab had only brought Roger to the door of her apartment one evening, taking his last shot at nailing her before she disappeared to wherever. He wore a big untrustworthy smile and his infallible instinct for erotic cliche: a bunch of flowers swirled in green paper, and what looked to be, beneath its festive wrapper, a bottle of jolly champers.
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She took the bottle from him and sent him home to his wife with the flowers.
She had handled Roger remarkably well, she told herself while sipping her second flute of purloined Veuve Clicquot. She knew she could be quickwitted when lightly threatened—it was a specialty of hers—but increase the level of threat and she had a tendency to jacklight. The ease with which she'd brushed Roger off owed something to the influence or the . . . what to call it. . . input of the Bear. Input was good. Maybe he was going to be good for her after all. And what she'd said! Roger, if you knew who I'm really fucking you'd die of shock. She hadn't said that, had she? She had. What was happening to her? She was changing. What had passed between herself and the Bear really?
In any case, when it was clear that the lab, and friends, and friends of friends, weren't going to pan out, she'd advertised in the Observer and the Times but had only gotten a couple of calls. She gave in to the inevitable, placed an ad in the Voice and waited for the wave of weirdos to phone. It hadn't been as bad as she feared. There had been a bunch of people she could turn down sight unseen—aggressive voices, voices out of the American wilderness with chaos and dementia blowing through them Hke wind—men who sounded like they were on the hustle, others who seemed too out of it to be trusted. But there had been other voices too, and she'd let six people come to the apartment for a looksee. She was considering three of them, a poised black woman in her late twenties who worked in an office and was going to night school for an MBA; a probably gay guy from the Midwest who was doing social work in Alphabet City; and a lively young waitress with a lot of contacts on the world music scene—Mauretania, Tannu Tuva, Joujouka—and who, it turned out when Iris let a passing reference fall, also knew about the Bear and liked the Tin Palace record a lot. Of the three, Iris liked the waitress best but thought her the least financially reliable. Either of the other two would do.
So why was she sitting there with her nerves pulled taut as piano wires? It was as if the skin of her world were being stretched thin and was about to tear open, letting in God knew what chaos and destruction.
Could it be because, well, she was preparing to move upstate in order to live in the greatest possible intimacy with, not to put too fine a point on it, a talking bear? Could that have something to do with it, did she think?
Odd, packing a few things up she had found the old issue of Rolling Stone she'd made such a big show of reading to the Bear that night before his arrest, the one with the quote from the Gnostic Gospels. If you bring forth what is within you it will save you; and if you don't, tough luck, pfft. . . .
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Which was interesting: whatever her professed values, she generally behaved, at least until her recent leap or lapse into sex with the Bear, as if the reverse were true. On the evidence, her working logic had always been that if she hung on to the job and stayed psychically coherent and close to the ground she might get through the whole of her life and die at the end of it without being conclusively torn to pieces; she had already in some measure sunived the loss of her daughters, and although the world could always come up with worse just when you thought it had exhausted its ingenuity or its supply, if she hung in there and didn't break the larger laws, maybe she'd make it through—no longer in one piece, too late for that, but without the ultimate atom of her agony being found out, then ripped out of her
body and revealed for all the world to see.
RESEARCH BIOLOGIST FOUND IN UPSTATE LOVE NEST WITH TALKING BEAR. Yes, that would do nicely. She knew it: she was going to end up on a supermarket rag rack.
The Bear would bring forth, had already brought forth, some of what was within her, and the experience might have drenched and blessed her but it also scared the shit out of her and screwed her nerves a millimeter short of snapping. They made garrotes out of piano wire, she remembered.
Life with the Bear.
Suck on this and I'll save you. That part of it's usual.
Iris touched her throat with the fingertips of her right hand. There's something predatory in the way he looks at my throat when he thinks I'm sleeping.
Of course, when she wasn't terrified by the prospect of living with the Bear, it felt almost perfect: warm, her only chance of refuge and possibly even transformation into someone braver and more whole and able. And it felt inevitable, fated. One odd thing she remembered: back when she'd been in court with Herb about the kids and hadn't yet understood she was going to lose them, she was going to bed one night in the too-small place she'd been able to afford. Aim and Trace asleep bundled together on their futon, and as she'd put her head down and closed her eyes, instead of darkness trees and mountains had appeared, and in the middle of the apparition stood a bear. At first she'd asked herself. Is that him? but quickly realized that it was not.
She had opened her eyes again and Tracy and Amy were sleeping under their duvet and the nightlight was on. She closed her eyes again.
Looking upslope Iris saw, standing upright on a pinestrewn saddle of land between tall pines, beyond which mountains rose white and craggy above the snowline, the largest bear she had ever seen, built perhaps on the Bear's
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model but, as she had to admit, incomparably more majestic. His archetype? she wondered briefly, then thought, No, it's not.
Then she opened her eyes again: Tracy and Amy, peaceful and unknowing, breathing softly, as before.
Shut them and there he was. All right, she thought, I'll look at him and let him look at me.
The bear had examined her then. Iris felt his gaze pass like a subtle substance through her from top to toe, and she knew that what this bear was exploring was her fitness to mother Tracy and Amy and to protect them in this world. She could not tell what the bear had decided or seen. As it turned out, she was going to lose them, and it seemed to Iris that he would have known that. So what had he been looking for really? Had he been checking her out for the Bear? For God, justice, the natural order, the forestn^ commission, what?
'Vlien she did lose her daughters in court to Herb's better expertise and more powerful connections, in the aftermath she wondered more seriously if the Bear had sent this big examiner—she wanted to say Protector but no protection had been afforded her—as some kind of immaterial emissary, and she had thought of giing the Bear a caU. As perhaps she should have done. WTio knows, he might have helped her then, since all the worldly and conventional help of friends and lawers had been no use to her whatever. The psychedeUcs weren't helping either. The problem at the time was that she had felt, having in some sense broken the Bear's heart, that she did not have the right to call him up and ask for sk'hook senice, tea, sympathy and an innocent protective cuddle.
Aim and Trace.
Iris hadn't intended her daughters' nicknames to be a hideous and ironic reproach to her, but it was true: her Aim had been poor, and she'd left almost no Trace on their hves. I released them into the world out of my body and lost them. Miat greater guilt was there than that? They were on their own and my thoughts were for myself. I deserve to be hurt. Stop this. Stop this now or you know where it will take you.
Iris changed her posture, straightened her spine, which had been bending, clenching. She rearranged her legs and breathed more deeply.
WTiere was I? Wliat was I thinking?
I am putting out this cigarette, having hardly smoked it.
Would the Bear help her now?
Her cousins had let the rope slip and she had drowned—a surprisingly restful experience with a horrible, choking aftermath. Would it be any different now? There was a voice far back in her head screaming at her with increasing hysterical insistence, Don't go don't go don't go.
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The laddershadow on the opposite wall began to slant and fade as degree by degree the day declined. Time was growing short, her nervestrings were winding tighter and tighter, creaking protest under the strain, and of course the devil's instrument on the endtable chose just this moment to ring again, shaking the room and jangling her nerves.
Let's pick it up this time. Maybe it's the perfect tenant. Maybe it's the solution to all my problems. Maybe it's God telling me I should stay in the city.
Iris picked the receiver up and said hello.
"Hey, sweetness," the Bear said in her ear, "when am I ever gonna get to see you again?"
He had the lay of the land down a lot better now. What had happened the first time was that he had gone one mountain north into new country without knowing it, and even when he followed the slope down to a cluster of rooftops he found dirt roads that led him nowhere familiar. It had cost him a second night in the wild, and when he did find his way back to Shady his far was alive with foraging grubs and other bughfe, bits of bark, fragments of needle and leaf.
It was in this condition that he reached the house again and met the photographer. The guy was pretty cool about meeting the Bear on a social basis, didn't mind hosing him down in the yard and scrubbing his fiir, all sides, with a stiff-bristled pushbroom and half a bottle of dishwashing fiquid. It felt so good I Then the guy drove down to Woodstock with some of the Bear's money and came back with a ton of groceries and beer in Grand Union bags. He was an okay guy, thought the Bear, a tall lean entirely American-looking number with a dirty-blond crewcut and a relaxed, shghtly arrogant manner; in any case he was more at ease with talking bears than most folks were. "Though I'm not too comfortable calling you C.J.," the Bear told him as they sat behind the house drinking cold Labatts, the Bear on a treestump and the photographer on a folding beach chair that looked ready to collapse underneath him any moment now. It was a measure of the photographer's cool, thought the Bear, that he did not seem to care about the condition of the chair one way or another.
"The reason," the photographer said, grimaced mildly, and ran the cold bottle around the back of his neck. "My name is Charles Manson. Same as the famous murderer."
"I see," said the Bear.
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"Middle initial J, hence C.J."
"We all have our cross to bear."
"What do you know about it?" the guy asked him, then laughed to demonstrate that he'd meant it as a joke. The Bear decided that, yes, the guy did have a sense of humor, but it was a few degrees out of phase with his own. A matter of timing and emphasis, mostiy. Nothing crucial.
"What do you say I call you Siege?"
"Siege?"
"Yeah, a contraction of C.J.—Ceej—and also because, well, that's what my life is like up here, a siege, and you're like this messenger who can come in and out."
"Uh huh, I get it. Okay. Fine." Then Siege told the Bear how, generally speaking, he would come and go in his own rhythm, but would also be on call for emergencies and food. "I'll be here now and then to develop some rolls downstairs or do some studio shots. Then sometimes I might stay overnight, if you don't mind, with a lady or two, though nine nights out of ten I'll be back in town with my wife. Barb and I have an understanding," he explained.
"Seems like." Barb. Siege. Parry. Thrust.
When Siege left, the Bear ate cold cuts, bread, potato salad, watched TV, had a few extra beers, and decided being home alone in the country wasn't all that great. He stepped outside, didn't notice the trees or the mountains much, or the fresh, fragrant air, and decided, yes, he was bored. By then it was too late to ring Iris to see how she was getting on. A
h well.
He sat on his front steps and listened to the wind in the pinebranches. After about fifteen minutes he realized that this wasn't an apartment house and he didn't have to worry about the neighbors. He went back inside, unpacked his horn and got in an hour or two of practice. In the absence of anything essential to play, and without much of a sense of connection to the music, he found his technical abilities multiplying as if on their own beneath his paws. He listened to his lines complicate their structures, do rhythmic reversals, end in little filigrees, heard his breath inquire its way into fresh configurations. New details opened their petals, and they were interesting conceptually he supposed, but he sensed little Hfe or beauty in them, and felt no passion in their making. He had always liked a narrative style of playing in which ideas developed in natural, even leisurely fashion before encountering any uprush into greater truth or feeling or thematic transformation, where technique accelerated to match the gathering energies of the moment; but now an overwrought notiness seemed to be encroaching upon him, filling every rift and making such narrative development unlikely if not impossible. It sounded obsessive and anxiety-ridden, on first scan. It seemed like form
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trying to overcompensate for a lack of animating essence. Where was the beauty in that?
Beauty, he thought, and dropped into a reverie about Iris for awhile, her soul as expressed by her body, her body as expressed by her soul, the arches of her ribcage beneath him, her sweet breasts, the brightness of her eyes.
Baby, come home.
Would she? It hadn't consciously occurred to him that she might not, but now he wondered. The world without a rose. Land without water, space without air. A heart without a heart. A Bear without sufficient reason to do amiJiing at all. I know that to even ask if a love like ours can survive in this world is to invite a gust of comedy into the room. It may not blow out the candle, but it sure does call the flame into question. Even so: Lord please do not deprive me of this mercy.
