The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  and all of the time.

  the whole time.

  The light was fading except across the wall, and people in overcoats were walking past in the clear chill, under the streetlamps, and I could smell something other than the dankness of the wall as I traced its roughness with my fingers. It must have been a woman's passing perfume, but for a moment I smelled my wife and the emerald color of the mushrooms, the memory of her beneath me, the solid, comforting feel of her - all of this was the same thing, and when I started walking again, I didn't go straight. I didn't head for the ivy-strewn facades of the campus buildings. Instead, I turned

  I turned and turned and turned.

  turned as if turning meant wrenching my life from a stable orbit.

  To the right I turned to follow the scatterings of mushrooms, and I don't know why, if I was just curious or if I'd already been captured in some way, because it wasn't like me. My dad had always said, before he passed from cancer in a very orderly way, that "you have to make a plan and keep to it." He said it to me, my mother, and my estranged sister, and he meant it. Routine was a religion for him, and we made it ours. Set meals. Set appointments. Set activities. I remember, when I turned eighteen, planning my rebellion, figuring out what I was going to do first and second and last, so I could savor my rebellion even as I.. .planned it. Less satisfying in the execution, the sex quick and lonely and not with someone I loved, the beer and pot putting me to sleep too quickly, waking to a cat licking my face, out cold on someone's sour-smelling lawn.

  But I turned the corner, followed the mushroom trail, which moved up and down the wall like a wave, now mirrored on the wall that had sprung up opposite it - and ahead the ache of a dull red sunset, which bathed the mushrooms in a crimson glow, and,

  suddenly, it wasn't that night

  that place,

  but a two-lane road the year before, the lights of our car projecting through the murk as we drove down a corridor of night. She was driving, and had the pursed lip look of concentration that I loved about her, and which I never told her I loved because I was afraid that if I told her, the expression would become different in some essential way, and I never wanted that to happen - never wanted her to be a different person, either, when we made love, staring at her face and seeing that same look of concentration, of being fully engaged.

  wanted no self-consciousness from her.

  wanted her lilting laugh to remain spontaneous.

  wanted her.

  to always preface her questions to me with "Let me ask you a question."

  But a look of concentration doesn't mean concentration, and when I said later, in response to the ever-present question, until I had exhausted the gauntlet of friends, family, strangers who didn't know, the ordinary words "car crash," I couldn't help but associate that look with her death, and thus her death with our sex and our conversations and our holidays, and all I really wanted was a way to break that linkage, in almost the same way I wanted the trail of mushrooms to come to an end, because, honestly, where could they possibly lead that would be good for me? Ordinary thoughts, the thoughts we all have: that I was already late for work; that Jenna would miss me or she wouldn't; that this would be my fifth absence this semester and how many did there have to be before they let me go?

  My legs didn't seem to have questions, though - they carried me forward. I followed the mushrooms because of the sparkle in Jenna's earrings, the gorgeous color of my wife's eyes. I followed the mushrooms because I can't say my wife's name. If I say her name, if I write her name, I will lose it - the name and my self-control. When I hear her name said, that is enough to conjure up the trail of evidence, the linkage. Unbearable.

  The red of the sunset had become as green as...

  A few people dressed in the outlandish garb I'd become accustomed to on campus pushed past me, and ahead, partially obscured by the lack of light, the spires of an old church or series of churches. Crenelations. A darkness that came from age, inhabiting the corners of the spires. A few circling birds or bats. It reminded me of the vacation my wife and I took to Eastern Europe one year, which made all that was ancient about my place of employment look petty and cheap and just-yesterday. She fell asleep in the train from Berlin to Prague. I saw her face, framed by the reflection of the landscape rushing past the window, without lines or care, saw how her arms lay at her sides. She felt secure. She felt safe, I could tell.

  Spires, though. I couldn't remember spires anywhere off-campus. I couldn't remember churches. Had I somehow ended up back on campus? It's true I had certain routines, certain blind spots, that meant I hadn't explored the city as I might have, and my wife to distract me, and then my grief.

  Two youths ran by holding flags with symbols on them that I'd never seen before. I saw a man wearing a goat costume. I saw a woman with no legs "walking" on stilts. Fraternities and fraternity jokes came to mind, although there was something too solemn and formal about them. I had lost the thread

  of the mushrooms.

  no longer followed them.

  just walked forward.

  randomly.

  Bathed in the green light of my wife's death, I turned as if to head back, except where I had come from no longer existed. It was as disappeared as the swathes of darkness my wife and I left behind us in our little car, headed home from a colleague's party, on the two-lane road at three in the morning.

  People crowded out onto the streets and I came under the weird light of gargoyled lampposts and buildings crowded and hunched in shadow to all sides, cut through by the narrowest of alleys. A festival of some kind, and I was in it or out of it or outside of it but caught up in it and the people kept pouring out of nowhere in their strange clothes and their strange accents and the strange look in their eyes and so I laughed with them and clapped my hands when they clapped their hands, and when the parade came by with animals foreign and fey, when the jugglers and the fire-eaters and the retired soldiers from distant wars, wearing uniforms I'd never seen before, when all of this converged, I tried not to think about it, tried not even to smell the stench of beer in the drains, the stench of vomit, of piss, tried to misread the mischief and malice in the eyes of those whose gaze I met. I realized this might be

  a break in the linkage.

  a severing of routine.

  a way out.

  Had I missed how random my world had become since my wife had died? Had my grief obliterated the real world for me?

  And so all of these thoughts overwhelmed me when I woke from my hiding place in an alley the next morning, having slept on garbage and filth, to find it - wearing a large gray hat, small as a child but with the wizened features of something already dead - staring down at me. It had long claws that dragged down below the sleeves of its robes. I could not look it in the face. It swayed back and forth as if in trance, and it said to me, as I looked up at it with a disbelieving smile on my face, "Are you lost?"

  And.

  I thought about how I had gotten to this point.

  I thought about Jenna and I thought about my wife and I realized I didn't love Jenna, that I didn't even really like Jenna, and with that thought came a kind of release and I was back on the two-lane road in the darkness and this time I welcomed it, brought it to me, soaked up those last few miles before she lost control of the car and swerved into the path of oncoming headlights connected to god-knows-what kind of vehicle, the same look of concentration on her face mixed with anger, because I was looking at her not at the road, arguing with her about some stupid point of routine that didn't make any sense to anyone but my father, and I wonder if she saw, in those last moments, some kind of entry to this place, and if she saw something that made her swerve, and it wasn't my fault at all, I wasn't the distraction that killed her.

  "Are you lost?" it says to me and I'm more frightened than I've ever been before, even when my wife died in front of me, and I say, "No. I'm not lost. I belong here."

  And I do.

  THE SITUATION

  How It Began
: Degradation of Existing Processes

  My Manager was extremely thin, made of plastic, with paper covering the plastic. They had always hoped, I thought, that one day her heart would start, but her heart remained a dry leaf that drifted in her ribcage, animated to lift and fall only by her breathing. Sometimes, when my Manager was angry, she would become so hot that the paper covering her would ignite, and the plastic beneath would begin to melt. I didn't know what to say in such situations. It seemed best to say nothing and avert my gaze. Over time, the runneled plastic of her arms became a tableau of insane images, leviathans and tall ships rising out of the whorling, and stranger things still. I would stare at her arms so I did not have to stare at her face. I never knew her name. We were never allowed to know our Manager's name. (Some called her their "Damager," though.)

  The trouble at work began after I came back from a two-week vacation at my apartment in the city, for this is when my Manager changed our processes. For as long as I could remember, the requests for the beetles we made came to Leer, my supervisor. I had made beetles for almost nine years in this way, my office carpet littered with their iridescent carapaces, the table in the corner always alive with new designs and gestation. However, when Scarskirt was hired to replace Mord, who had moved to Human Resources, we no longer followed this process.

  Worried, I pointed this out to Scarskirt during the brief interlude when I taught her how to make her own beetles. She just laughed and said, "Maybe a change is good. We all do such good work, it shouldn't matter, right?"

  I should note that "Leer," "Scarskirt," and "Mord" are not their real names. And all three were flesh-and-blood like me when I first knew them. Leer looked a little like a crane, and I had counted her as a friend, just as Mord had been a friend before his move. Scarskirt, though, stared at reflective surfaces all day and flattered so many people that I was wary of her.

  After I came back, I found that Leer and Scarskirt shared an office and did everything together. Now, when the requests came in, all three of us were notified and we might all three begin work on the same project.

  I remember coming into one meeting with the Manager, holding the beetle I had just created in my office. It was emerald, long as a hand, but narrow, flexible. It had slender antennae that curled into azure blue sensors on the ends, its shining carapace subdivided in twelve exact places. The beetle would have fit perfectly in a school child's ear and clicked and hummed its knowledge into them.

  But Scarskirt and Leer had created a similar beetle.

  My Manager immediately thought it was my fault, and erupted into flame.

  Leer stared at Scarskirt, who was staring at the metallic table top. "I thought we talked to you about this," Leer said to me, still looking at Scarskirt.

  "No, you didn't," I said, but the moment belonged to them.

  My Manager forced me to put my beetle in my own ear, a clear waste, and an act that gave me nightmares: of a burning city through which giant carnivorous lizards prowled, eating survivors off of balconies. In one particularly vivid moment, I stood on a ledge as the jaws closed in, heat-swept, and tinged with the smell of rotting flesh. Beetles intended for the tough, tight minds of children should not be used by adults. We still remember a kinder, gentler world.

  After this initial communication problem, the situation worsened.

  My Manager's Existing Issues

  Twice a year, my Manager would summon me to her office on the fiftieth floor. A member of Human Resources would meet me at my office and attach a large slug to my spine through a specially-designed slit in the back of our office uniforms. This would allow me to walk to the elevators and then up and out to the Manager's office with no memory of the experience. When it was time to return, the HR representative would reattach the slug. It always felt sticky and smooth at the same time. And wet, like an oyster.

  What was Management trying to hide between floors three and fifty? I don't know, but as with the beetle intended for children, I would have nightmares after these meetings. In the nightmares, I was falling forever down a shaft lined with thousands of decomposing bodies. Plastic bodies. Human bodies. Bodies of leopards and of rats, of baboons and of lizards. I could smell the rot of them, sense their spongy softness. And yet my horror would be mixed with delight: so many animals in one place. A sparrow sometimes settled on the tiny patch of yellowing grass outside of my apartment, but I never saw more than that in real life.

  Every meeting with my Manager was the same. In her office, the walls decorated with pleasant if banal scenes of woods and splashing brooks and green fields out of some fantasy land, she would be sitting behind her desk, smiling. Her hair would be fresh-cut, falling in straight blonde waves. The bland paper of her skin would be newly replaced by the kind of colored crepe paper common to the festivals of bygone eras. I would always catch the elusive scent of some decorative perfume. For some reason, this smell frightened me.

  "Hello, Savante," she would say, although this was not my name.

  "Hello, Manager," I would reply.

  Up close, her eyes were like the glistening grit you find at the edges of drying asphalt. In the quiet, I could hear the leaf in her chest - just the slightest whispering shift of dead plant matter against plastic as it touched the sides of her ribcage. I wondered if each time another piece disintegrated into the dust at the bottom of her chest cavity.

  "Do you love me?" she always asked.

  I could remember a time and a world where such a question could never have been asked.

  Did I love her?

  Between meetings this became the question that filled my life. Ever since she had become my Manager, my raises had become smaller and smaller. The last raise had been a huge leech shaped like a helmet. It was meant to suck all the bad thoughts out of your head. It smelled like bacon, which seemed promising. I had invited Mord and Leer over to my apartment and we'd fried it up in a skillet. I'd gotten a week's worth of sandwiches out of it.

  And so as I sat in her office, I'd think: Is it because of how I answer this one question?And: Does she think she is giving me good raises?And, finally: IfI tell her I love her, will it go better or worse for me?

  "Do you love me?"

  I always replied, "No, I do not love you."

  Her response varied. Sometimes my reply pleased her. She would hum and sing and even burble in a contented way. Other times, my reply exhausted her. She would sit staring blankly into space until I left. A few times, flames would appear at her tiny wrists and she would reach out and try to burn the sides of my face. I could not predict her reaction, so at first I always raced to reattach the slug to my spine immediately after my answer, wanting the sure clean rush of extinguished memory. This seemed the best way to avoid punishment. But after a while, the process grew too familiar and I found I no longer really cared about her reaction.

  I mention this because in the six months since Scarskirt had been hired, my Manager had accelerated the rate of these meetings. She called me into her office once each month.

  "Do you love me?"

  "No, I do not."

  "Do you love me?"

  "No. I do not."

  "Do you love me?"

  "No - I do not."

  "Do you love me?"

  "No. I. Do. Not."

  "Do you love me?"

  "No."

  I always wondered what would happen if I replied, "Yes, I love you. With all my heart."

  Could it be worse? Yes, obviously I thought it could be.

  Memories of Mord

  Although harrowing at the time, my two-week vacation in my apartment now seems like a calm respite from all my worries - this even though half a dozen times marauders tried to get through my defenses and the electricity flickered on and off, off and on.

  I've thought of my vacation as the turning point, and perhaps it was, for during the time I was gone Scarskirt and Leer bonded ever more closely. But the more I review the events of the last few months in my head, the more I think the beginning of the end came
well before that - when Mord departed from our team.

  Heavy and strong, Mord had a light wit and an engaging manner before he moved to Human Resources. Outside of the company, he often appeared nervous, but while within its walls his assertiveness bound us together.

  I remember that the week before he left us, Mord and I stood in an old stairwell of the company building, one with skylights built into the wall, although they were grimed over with filth and pollution. Outside, in the city, it was almost impossible to find a bird, but the building was so large and had such resources that a bird might survive for years. If it found the right floor.

  Mord liked real animals, hinted that he had had contact with them in his former job. One year he even had a bird count of seventy-five sparrows, more than anyone in the company. He told me he loved the "simple functionality" of sparrows, their durability, their instinct to survive. Me, I just liked hanging out with Mord while the bird watched. Or inviting him and Leer to my apartment to stare at the yellowing grass of my front lawn in hopes a bird would appear there.

  So it came as a shock to me that day when he said, "I'm moving to Human Resources," as the landing beneath us undulated like a tongue.

  "What?" I said. "You can't do that."

  "Don't worry. It won't matter." He stared through his roving binoculars up the twisting stairwell for a hint of flutter, of flight. "Everything will be the same."

  "Will it?" I asked him in a moment of candor. "Will we still be friends?"

  Mord smiled, the binoculars still clamped over his eyes in a possessive grip. "Of course. We'll be friends like we're friends now."

  "And Leer, too?"