The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  "What do you need?" he asked. "I have meetings to go to."

  "I am having trouble with communication," I told him. "The others are discussing projects and brainstorming and going to lunch without me. I need to be attached at the ankle like the rest of them. How can I be proactive if I am ignored?"

  Slumber frowned. "You're not being ignored. Nothing of importance is being discussed. You still go to the status meetings, and we discuss everything there."

  Yes, the status meetings. During these meetings I now learned what Leer and Scarskirt and the others had decided during the prior week. I learned what lack of role I was to have during the next week. I would stare at Leer, willing her to return my gaze, to understand from the pained look on my face just how much this was hurting me. But she never did. Scarskirt would stare, though. A kind of measuring look. An appraisal. I did not like the hardness of that glance, given while she told a joke. A stolen glimpse to test my resolve.

  I tried to argue with Slumber, but he cut me off. "We can always give you another leech if you like, to cure your discomfort," he said. "But don't worry, we all value you."

  He left, and five minutes later was laughing and joking with Leer and Scarskirt.

  Now I had to send out my beetles as spies, just so I would know the basics of what was happening, just so I could do my job. But beetles are not meant as spies; they are made to disseminate information, not capture it. Despite all my efforts to change them, most did a poor job. Several never came back and I had to destroy others that had been tampered with by Scarskirt so they would not infect the rest.

  I could not complain to the Mord by then. I had discovered he was not my friend. While seeking solace in isolation, I came upon the Mord and Scarskirt in a forgotten part of the third floor, among the musty ruins of some sort of outdated cathedral. They stood upon a crumbling platform decorated with gold leaf, leaning toward each other, connected at the forehead by the disembodied siphon of a long-necked clam. I watched them for half an hour, noting the bliss on their faces. I could see that they were far, far away. The Mord was now much more animal than flesh-and-blood. I could smell his musk even from my hiding place.

  I had begun to call him "the Mord," as had many others.

  Unacceptable Disregard for Good Practice

  One day, a design was presented at a status meeting and it had the face of my remote friends, "Winterlong," looking slack and haggard. The cat-thing with pigeon legs meowed and Winterlong's face contorted into a meow.

  I was shocked. I had just talked to him that morning.

  After the meeting, I took Leer aside. Leer was wearing a ridiculous pink jacket made of living shark scales that Scarskirt had given her. She had been parading around in it all week, delighted with her office mate's castoffs.

  "That was Winterlong," I said. "Butchered."

  Scarskirt came up behind us without warning. She spoke before Leer could reply.

  "Don't be ridiculous or paranoid," Scarskirt said. She laughed, but it was not her pretty laugh. It was more like a horsehead laugh. Her eyes were wide and bright and the blade of her smile cut me.

  "You're imagining things," Leer said, staring at Scarskirt. "That wasn't Win- terlong. Not really." But her eyes were moist and her voice was thin and sad.

  Winterlong's personal effects showed up on Scarskirt's desk soon after.

  "He had no relatives," Scarskirt explained at the next status meeting, batting her eyes at Slumber, who made a sound like the world's laziest orgasm.

  The First of My Proactive Efforts

  Once, when things were still good, Leer and I had shared beetles. We had even created a few just for fun. At lunch, we would sneak out behind the company building with a blanket and sit on the little hill there, looking out onto a ravaged landfill heavy with the skeletons of vultures and then, beyond that, the city in all its strange mix of menace and vulnerability. The grass was yellowing rather than dead. A wiry tree stood on the hill at that time. We would eat crackers and old cans of shredded meat, the smell in that context almost unbearably tantalizing.

  After lunch, we would unlock the cases containing our beetles. The shining green-and-crimson carapaces would open like the lids of eccentric jewelry boxes to reveal their golden wings, and we would release them into the world.

  Those beetles contained every joyous thing we had ever known, and we loved to watch them fly out into the distance.

  "My father's dry laugh!" I would shout.

  "My mother's mock frown!" Leer would reply.

  "The color of the faded cover of my nursery rhyme book!"

  "The taste of real potato soup!"

  "The feel of thousand-thread-count clean sheets!"

  "The ache of muscles after playing stick ball!"

  Our voices would get softer and softer until I was whispering things like "The smell of my father's aftershave when he reached down to hug me."

  Then we would stand there, trailing off into silence, and get so much satisfaction out of wondering who would find them and what impact they would have on their discoverers. Sometimes we would even have tears in our eyes.

  I can remember Leer saying once, "This hill makes me happy."

  So it was that when I decided to become proactive in the midst of my worsening situation, I persuaded Leer to join me on the hill, "for old time's sake."

  The grass was mostly gone by then and the tree, too. Earthworms writhed and died in the naked dirt. The day was cold and gray, and the city did not bear looking at. The muffled sound of explosions, the smells of smoke and intense rot, told the story well enough. We stood there and turned our backs on the city, looking up at the company building and searching for glimpses of the behemoth grub, lost in the low-lying clouds.

  "What has happened, Leer?" I asked her. "I haven't changed. I'm still the same as I ever was."

  Leer refused to look at me. She stood with arms folded and stared into the blank windows in front of her. On this day, she had revisited her true form. There was no artifice to her.

  "You're imagining things," Leer said.

  "Like I imagined Winterlong's face," I said.

  "Yes," she said, but so quietly I almost couldn't hear her.

  "Leer, I know things have changed. It's not my imagination. We all used to be so close."

  "Do you know," Leer said, "how much I hate this place? I hate my job. I hate being here. And I hate the world out there."

  I shuddered at that. To think of the past, the distant past, before all of this - she was right. Who could bear it? Sometimes I wondered if we had been sending out those beetles not to help others but to help get rid of the horrible weight of happy memories.

  "I know you hate it," I said. "I've known that for a while. I'm not stupid. But what does that have to do with me?"

  Leer said, "Why do you fight it? Why do you care about any of it?"

  "In the old days, we were all friends," I said.

  "It can't be that way anymore. It's just work."

  "But why?"

  Leer just shrugged.

  I think I started to cry then.

  Leer took pity on me and said, "It'll be better. It'll be better, I'm sure of it. When we're under Slumber. Then it will all be fine."

  By then, we had both noticed the Mord coming up the hill. He was larger than I remembered and his thick fur had a golden brown luster to it. His eyes and fangs stood out more.

  The Mord wasn't walking up the hill. The Mord was levitating up the hill, effortless.

  I expelled my breath all in a rush.

  Leer blanched and a look of terror came over her face.

  "I couldn't bear to be disconnected from the worms," she whispered to me. "And Mord can read lips."

  The Mord settled down in front of us. Even sitting on the incline, he was taller than us, and his shadow unfurled itself across us and across the entire top of the hill. I had the curious sensation of seeing his human face superimposed over his animal features, for just a second.

  Then I caught a hint of
movement behind him, at the bottom of the hill. Scarskirt stood there, her arms folded, her legs apart, sentinel-silent.

  Leer looked me in the eyes and said, "We don't want you here. We aren't the same. You've changed. You don't do good work anymore."

  The Mord let out a roar that pushed its blood-shot, crazed eyes half out of their sockets and pressed my hair flat against the sides of my head. In the Mord's breath I could smell a thousand different kinds of rot. I could smell the stench of the entire company.

  Ad Hoc Meetings, Further Abnegating Process

  Soon after the encounter with the Mord, my Manager began to visit me for reasons other than to ask her perpetual question. She would burst in near the end of the day and begin to rant, spittle flying from her mouth. Sometimes the language would be foreign to me. Sometimes I could understand the words but the context was incomprehensible. Other times, there would be no words, just shouts and shrieks and grunts.

  My Manager's body would contort during these meetings, like a wet rag being wrung dry. She had become impossibly thin so that her eyes were cavernous in her face. The smell of wet burning plastic clung to her. Her hair had fallen out and she always wore a different wig, some of them living and some of them dead.

  "I don't know how to help you," I would tell her, genuinely concerned about her. In the context of my current situation, I thought she was, if not a friend, then at least not an enemy.

  Those of my spy beetles that had survived the change of purpose had recorded a variety of images in the myriad halls and passageways of the third floor. One of the most arresting involved my Manager. I had seen her, pensive and quietly weeping, walking across a cracked marble floor, only to stop and give out a cry of surprise. For hunching toward her with wet abandon was the fish with her face, and in that moment as the beast drew near, I saw an image that haunted me: of my Manager's shock registering simultaneously on two identical faces. I am sure this is the first time she knew of the discontinuation of the fish project.

  As for the ad hoc meetings, she would invariably storm out of my office and my unease would become chronic, for I knew that I had been unable to give her any kind of solace.

  Perhaps the only solace would have been for Slumber to be sucked back up into the distance of the perpetual clouds ringing the behemoth company grub, never to return.

  Taking Further Steps

  My beetles continued to bring me information in a halting fashion, but most of it just depressed me more. One report I watched while home at my apartment showed Scarskirt hunting down the fish project and stabbing it to death. Her knife sliced down, up, down, up, down as the fish tried to get away from her ever more slowly, spurting a thick green blood. The look on Scarskirt's face was as beatific and composed as during one of our status meetings. When the fish lay still, great ridges of exposed flesh quivering, Scarskirt reached forward and hacked off the copy of the Manager's face. Then she hunched down and showed it to my beetle, so I would get a good look at it, dripping, pale, and rubbery. She was smiling, of course.

  After seeing this, my stress level went up exponentially. I grew so afraid I took to carrying weapons. I jury-rigged giant rhinoceros beetles into simple projectile weapons that fired either the remnants of less-fortunate beetles or old-fashioned shrapnel I'd found in the cathedral ruins. I made dung beetles into moldy grenades, using a liquid wrung out of my message bats as the fuel. I put up zones of foul-smelling molds outside my office, to discourage fleshand-blood visitors. I devised subtle camouflage for myself, coating myself in the same fireflies that lined my walls, so that it was not always clear if I was in the office or not.

  "Remember when" became how I started every conversation with my fellow employees during status meetings, although they did not like it. Scarskirt became openly contemptuous and Leer followed her lead. Scarskirt goaded Leer to send beetles to lazily, almost toyingly, attack my office defenses so that I would be forced to expend resources repelling them.

  "Everything will be fine," Scarskirt would reassure me in the breakroom in the morning as I kept my distance.

  In the afternoon, she would walk by me in the hall as I flinched away, and say loudly, "Why are your messages so abusive?" even though I had not communicated with her.

  Leer by contrast would be professional when I bumped into her on my way to the bathroom, but with the kind of professionalism that one despises in a supposed friend. She was changing her appearance three or four times a morning by then. Sometimes she would give me a sickly half-smile, as if she had been caught in a monstrous lie.

  One day I could have sworn I heard a sighing sound coming from the darkness that was the high ceiling of my office. The ceiling almost seemed alive. I told myself I was paranoid, but that afternoon I felt a vast wind and a huge black manta ray detached itself and flew out of my door and into the shadows. Such a creature was beyond Scarskirt's skill level, or even Leer's. It had to be reporting back to the Mord.

  I now saw the Mord's almost unrecognizable features on the flounder's back at least twice a day. Those huge eyes stared out at me with some unrecognizable passion emblazoned on them. Sometimes the Mord would speak and say in a gravelly voice, "You never loved your manager" or "You should leave Scarskirt alone." Other times I intuited a pleading, pained look on his face as he murmured things like "Help me. Help me, Savante."

  But I no longer trusted him.

  How could I?

  Additional Alterations Used to Isolate Me

  At Slumber's urging, perhaps aided by a suggestion from Scarskirt, everyone on the creative team except me had themselves altered so that they shared certain uniform attributes. These attributes included green exoskeletons through which the familiar faces peered as if through a graveyard of excavated crustaceans. A lingering scent of brine became common to their type. The network of worms became mobile so that they remained connected wherever they went. Slumber took them personally to the company's recreational rooms, eschewing Human Resources and slugs alike to show his trust in them. They even began to talk the same. They all began to talk like Scarskirt.

  I did not know how I felt about being left out of this phase of entitlements. I did not know how my Manager felt about being left out, either.

  In my nightmares I was floating in a sea of cracked-open crab and lobster parts, miles from shore, under a fiery red moon. Beside me the corpse of the fish project floated, its face bobbing beside it, still screaming in death.

  My Personnel File: More Attempts at Being Proactive

  Despite all of the pressures I have detailed, I did complete several legitimate beetle projects, garnering a grudging praise from Slumber, who otherwise I saw not at all. In this way - through the quality of my work - I hoped to preserve my job.

  I also decided to visit my personnel file in the basement. This was one of the perks of working for the company, especially as I did not require the Mord or another member of Human Resources to accompany me. I hoped my file might divulge some clue, some nuance, that would give me a way out of my increasingly perilous situation.

  The elevator down was sleek and fast and had not been used for any company experiments, which was a relief. When I got to the records department, an attendant wearing a surgical mask led me to the right room. My large box was stacked amongst thousands of other such boxes, all studded with tiny breathing holes. Yelping and snorting noises came from some of the boxes, bird trills from others.

  Although the attendant was at least six feet tall and made of muscle and steel, he grunted with the effort of pulling the box down and putting it on the table in front of me.

  It had been eight months since I had visited my personnel file. At that time, I had taken it for a walk on the little hill and fed it some carefully hoarded treats. I had opened up to it and told it things about my father, my mother, and my arduous trek to the city that I had never told anyone. I remembered that moment as a lightening of a burden, a cathartic experience.

  I opened up the box.

  Inside lay the unrecognizabl
e corpse of my personnel file. Anyone unfamiliar with it would have seen only some kind of large mammal. Rotting. White maggots curling through the masses of intestines, organs, sinew, and soft tissue with the mindless motions of a baby's fingers. My flesh went cold and I think I stopped breathing for a time.

  There were many, many knife wounds. I had seen those kinds of marks before.

  Even beyond the fear, a feeling of intense sadness came over me. The killing seemed so vindictive, and so unnecessary.

  "Do you still want to take it out - or, perhaps, look through it?" the attendant asked, offering me a pair of gloves.

  "No," I said. "There's no need."

  Everything was very clear.

  The Beginning of the End

  Trapped. I could not go to the Mord, Leer, Slumber, or my Manager. Should I throw myself on the mercy of Scarskirt, I felt certain I would end up like Winterlong. I dreamed of quitting, but could not see a future beyond the company. For a while, I tried desperately to act normal, but it was difficult under the circumstances.

  After my visit to my personnel file, the black manta ray covered my ceiling all the time. All I could see on the flounder's back was the Mord's thick block of a face, its huge eyes staring at me, inscrutable. The image never spoke to me, but I studied that face for long minutes, trying to decipher some further message there. All I could really see is how the eyes still retained some essence of the old Mord - how, if I looked long enough, I could believe I was still looking at a picture of my old friend in a bear suit. The Mord who was always quick with a joke and liked nothing better than to spend lunch in a stairwell with a thermos of coffee and a pair of binoculars.