The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The man lay there, covered in sand and blood, arms crumpled underneath him. You stood there for several minutes as your team ran up to you. You stood there and looked out at the desert, wondering what else might come out of it.

  They told Delorn, and he came to take you home, you dazed, staring but not seeing. Once inside, Delorn took off all of your clothes. He placed you in the bathtub. He used precious water to calm you, massaging your skin. He rubbed your head. He cleaned the salt and sweat from your body. He toweled you dry. And then he laid you down on the bed and he made love to you.

  You had been far away, watching the dead man in the sand. But Delorn's tongue on your skin brought you back to yourself. When you came, it was in a rush, like the water in the bath, as you reconnected with your body.

  You remember looking at him as if he were unreal. He was selfless in that moment. He was a part of you.

  Day Three

  In the morning, Benkaad is gone, leaving just the imprint of his body on your bed. The money you'd promised him has been taken from what you'd left in your bag. You try to remember why you let him sleep next to you, but the thought behind the impulse has fled.

  Out into the sun, past the tavern keeper, cursing at someone. The day is hot, almost oppressive. You can walk the desert for two weeks without faltering, but after two days of a bed, you've already lost some of your toughness. The sun finds you. It makes you uncomfortable.

  Benkaad waits for you on the street. As soon as he sees you, he drops a piece of paper and walks away. His gaze lingers on you before he's lost around a corner, as if to remember you, for a time at least.

  You pick up the paper. Unfold it. It has a map on it, showing you where to find the familiar. A contact name and a password. Is it a trap? Perhaps, but you don't care. You have no choice.

  That morning, you had woken refreshed, for the first time in over a year, and somehow that makes you feel guilty as you follow the map's instructions - through a warren of streets you wouldn't have believed could exist in so small a town. You forget each one as soon as you leave it.

  As you walk, a sense of calm settles over you. You're calm because everything you face is inevitable. You have no choice. This is the missing piece of The Book. This replaces The Book. You're afraid, yes, but also past caring. Sometimes there's only one chance.

  Finally, a half hour later, you're there. You knock on a metal door in a rundown section of town. The directions had been needlessly complex, unless Benkaad meant to delay you.

  You've got one hand on your gun as the door opens. An old woman stands there. You give her the password. She opens the door a little wider and you slip inside.

  "Do you have the money?" she asks.

  "Money? I paid the one who led me here."

  "You need more money to see it and connect to it."

  Suddenly, the surge of adrenalin. It is here. A familiar.

  Two men appear behind the woman. Both are armed with bullet-fed guns. Ancient. They've the look of hired guns, their tans deep, leathery.

  You walk past them to the room that holds the familiar.

  "Only half an hour," the one man says. "It's dying. Any more and it'll be too much for you, and for it."

  You stare past him. Someone is just finishing up with the familiar. He has detached from its umbilical, but there is still a look of stupefied wonder on his face.

  The umbilical is capped by an odd cylindrical device.

  "What's that?" you ask the old woman.

  "The filter. You don't want that thing all the way into your mind. You'd never get free."

  "Strip," one of the men says.

  "Strip? Why?"

  "Just strip. We need to search you," the man says, and raises his gun. The old woman looks away. The other man has a hunger in his eyes you've seen too many times before.

  There's no other way out. You shoot the two men, the old woman, and the customer. None of them seem to expect it. They fall with the same startled look of surprise.

  You don't know if they'll wake up. You don't care. It surprises you that you don't care.

  Your head is throbbing.

  You enter the room.

  There, in front of you, lies the familiar, its wings fluttering on the bed. It seems to both press down into the bed and try to float above it. Its wings are ragged. Instead of being black, it is dead white. It looks as if it were drifting, wherever the air might take it.

  You take the umbilical and bring it around to the back of your head. The umbilical slides through the filter. You feel a weak pressure, a probing presence, then a firm, more assured grasp, a prickling - then a wet piercing. The taste of lime enters your mouth. A scratchiness at the back of your throat. You gasp, take two deep breaths, and then you hear a voice inside your head.

  You are different.

  "Maybe," you say. "Maybe I'm the same."

  I don t think you are the same. I think you are different. I think that you know why.

  "Because I've actually seen the City."

  No. Because of why you want to find it.

  "Can you take me there?"

  Do you know what you are asking?

  "I attached myself to you."

  True. But there is a filter weakening our connection.

  "True. But that might change."

  You don't know how I came to be here, do you?

  "No."

  I was cast out. I was defective. You see my color. You see my wings. I was created this way. I was meant to die in the desert. Ilet a man I found attach himself so that would not happen. Eventually, it killed him.

  "I'm stronger than that."

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  "Do you know your way back to the City?"

  In a way. I can feel the City. I can feel it sometimes, out there, moving...

  "I have a piece of the City in my head."

  I know. I can sense it. But it may not help. And how do you plan to leave this place? Do you know that even with the filter, in a short time, it will be too late to unhook yourselffrom me. Is that what you want? Do you want true symbiosis?

  Is it what you want? You don't know. It seems a form of madness, to want this, to reach for it, but there is a passage in The Book of the City that reads:

  Take whatever the City gives you. If it gives you a cane, take it and use it. If it gives you dust, take the dust and make a house of it. If it gives you wisdom, take wisdom. The City does not give gifts lightly. It is not that kind of City.

  You're crying now. You've been strong for so long you've forgotten the relief of being weak. What if it's the wrong choice? What if you never get him back even after all of this?

  Are you sure? the familiar says inside your mind. It is different than connecting for a short while. It is a surrender of self.

  You wipe the tears from your face. You remember the smell of Delorn, the feel of his body, his laugh. The smell of lime is crushing.

  "Yes," I'm sure, you say, and you find that it is true, even as you disconnect the filter, even as you begin to feel the tendrils of unfamiliar thoughts intertwining with your own thoughts.

  You have chosen.

  The most secret part of The Book of the City, which you have never reread, is hidden on the back pages. It reads:

  I lived in a town called Haart, where I served as a border guard and my husband Delorn worked as a farmer at the oasis that sustained our people. We loved each other. I still love him. One night, he was taken from me, and that is why I keep this book. One night, I woke and he was not beside me. At first, I thought he had gotten up for a glass of water or to use the bathroom. But I soon discovered he was not in the house. I searched every room. Then I saw the light, through the kitchen window, saw the light, flooding the darkness, and heard the quiet breath of the City. I ran outside. There it lay, in all its glory, just to the west. And there were the imprints of my husband's boots, illumined by the City - heading toward it. The City was spinning and hovering and gliding back and forth across the desert. Then it was gone.

/>   In the morning, we followed my husband's tracks out into the desert. At a certain point, they stopped. The boot prints were gone. Delorn was gone. The City was gone. It was just me, screaming and shrieking, and the last set of tracks, and the friends who had come out with me.

  And every day since I have had a question buried in my head: Did he choose the City over me? Did hego because he wanted to, or because it called to him and he had no choice?

  At dusk, you escape, the familiar wrapped around your body, under the robes you've stolen from a dead man. Your collar is high to disguise the place where it entered you and you entered it. Out into the desert, where, when the border town is far distant, you can release him from beneath your robes and he, unfurling, can rise above you, your familiar, crippled wings beating, and together you can seek out the City.

  It is a cool night, and a long night, and you will be miles away by dawn.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF SHANE HAMILL

  Here is everything that I know about the strange events that happened in and around the area of our bookstore, starting eighteen months ago. This is also everything I know about Shane Hamill. We never liked him. I want that on the record, first and foremost. We never liked him, and I'm fairly sure he never liked us. There may have been some good reasons for this situation, and some bad reasons, too, but I doubt any of it is important now.

  Shane once made out with a girl in a graveyard. I don't know if he met the girl there or if they came there together. I mention it because Shane told us about it so often, or referred to it. For my part, I found this fact kind of creepy, not cool. Others, more attuned to the Goth scene, I believe made Shane into a sort of hero over it, behind his back. Although, as I've stated, we didn't like him. He was a good worker, and some even said he was a good supervisor, I'll admit that - but no better than the rest of us. We're all good workers.

  Sometimes, even early on in his employment with our bookstore, Shane had a far-off stare, which was strictly against bookstore policy. I cannot stress that enough: Shane often said or did things that were against corporate policy. Not explicitly against policy - not the formal policies - but still things no one else said or did.

  For example, once, during a slow day, we were both standing around the cash register, Shane staring out the window, when he said to me, "I'll bet it's not snowing in Sarajevo." Now, the weirdest thing about what he said is that it wasn't snowing here. So I don't know why he would say that. It didn't make sense. Besides, who's to say it wasn't snowing in Sarajevo at that moment? It might very well have been snowing in Sarajevo. There might have been a blizzard for all Shane knew. That bothered me for a long time, to tell the truth.

  Another time, Shane actually paid for a book for a customer, and it wasn't even because he liked her, if you know what I mean. He felt sorry for her! Which also doesn't make sense. When someone can't afford groceries, that's a tragedy. When they can't afford a book, that's just a shame. Maybe she told him it wasn't snowing in Sarajevo. I have no idea.

  But all of this happened before the boat, and it was manageable, these little things he did that made him unlike the rest of us. (Although I think it's all relevant. Even the kiss in the graveyard, which I may get back to later in this report; I was given no directions to follow in making this report, so I think it's best if I just get it all down and let you guys in HQ worry about what should be in it and what shouldn't be in it.)

  The boat was just like.. .like a physical manifestation of his strangeness. He'd been borrowing books about boats secretly for a while before he asked our manager if he could build one on a lot not far from our bookstore.

  I still remember hearing our manager snort when Shane asked him. I was kneeling in the History section, facing copies of William Vollman's latest, and they were in Politics, just one shelf over. He snorted and said something like, "What would you want to do that for?"

  And Shane replied, "I'm going to build the boat and then I'm going to leave for the ocean."

  Our manager snorted again and said, "No, really. Is it some kind of hobby?"

  Slowly, Shane said, "I guess you could call it that."

  And our manager was so amused - and bored, too, probably - that he told Shane that he could build a boat if he wanted to.

  That was eighteen months ago. Now that the boat is built and Shane is gone, it doesn't seem funny anymore, even to those of us who are still bored. At first, it didn't seem like he was serious. A boat? Near the bookstore? How could one man build a boat, anyway? It turned out he could, but very slowly. He started out by buying lumber for scaffolding. Then he bought lumber for the hull. One weekend, his friends must have come out and helped him, because when I got there on Monday (I don't work weekends; that's what seniority and an assistant manager badge can get you), about two months after he'd started, the scaffolding was all in place, along with ten long curved beams for the hull. I remember looking at it and thinking it was some abstract sculpture, like the stuff in the more boring books in our Art section. It didn't look like a boat back then. It looked like a mess. A few of us stood out back at lunchtime and we laughed as we watched Shane work on it. He'd get no more done than bolting something in place to something else in an hour - I can't pretend to know enough about boat-building to give you the technical terms. To us it was clear: Shane had gone mad. Something in his head had gotten loose and inside he was thinking "I'll bet it's not snowing in Sarajevo" over and over again. Or maybe he was thinking about the girl in the graveyard.

  I should tell you that I looked through his knapsack once, while he was working on the boat. I couldn't help myself. I didn't like Shane, but it fascinated me that he was doing something so insane. I wanted to know why. I wanted to have some clue. I found a little notebook inside and quickly took it to the photocopier, but could only run off a couple of pages before another employee came by, so I put the notebook back. But I've still got those two pages. I'll transcribe them here for you, in case it's useful:

  Once, I made out with a girl in a graveyard. I didn't realize it was a portent of the future. It was the kind of thing thousands of people have done before me, and if it had personal significance, if it symbolized a certain individual daring, a frisson of experience outside of the every day, well, then, I seem to have psychoanalyzed all the mystery out of it by now, haven't I? The fact is, the world is generally indifferent to such acts. They do not reverberate or echo. No quiver or ripple comes unbidden to others because of it. But I still think of this event, if not often, then often enough; the softness of her lips, the intensity of her tongue, the feel of her against me, and, also, I can remember feeling the tombstones all around us, almost a dulling comfort against the burning. What am I to make of it? As much as "I'll bet it isn't snowing in Sarajevo." Later, we sat there, gazing at the dead. Perhaps it was then that I decided I'd rather leave than stay.

  There's more, but it's not particularly useful to relate it. Some things are too personal, and I do not feel I deserve the comments anyway.

  So it wasn't until month five or six that we really began to see the shape of the thing, and to realize the extent of Shane's Folly, as some of us began to call it. It took the form of a Roman galley, or so Shane said. It had five slots on each side for oars and one main mast in the middle. Typical for him, when I asked him where he'd gotten the blueprints for it, he just smiled and flipped me a coin. I'm going to take a rubbing of it with a pencil and show it to you here, right in this report, so you can see just how disrespectful Shane was to those around him.

  A coin with a tiny, rough image of a boat on it. My first thought was outrage - that he had wasted the time of my fellow employees on building something that wouldn't even work. Later, I realized that this thought meant Shane had gotten to me in a way. I thought about the ramifications of this while in my apartment enjoying a glass of cheap brandy and some jazz music and looking over the heirlooms my father had left me (if any of you are ever in the market for antiques for around the house, you might consider checking with me first). For a time, I
even thought about going to the manager and handing in my resignation. Shane had compromised my integrity as a corporate employee. He had tried to substitute his vision for the corporate vision in my mind. He had almost succeeded.

  At the time he tossed me the coin, I didn't let him know the extent of his almost-victory. I flipped the coin right back to him and said, "If you're not going to be serious, why should I listen to you?" He replied, "Because if you don't, you'll be left out." I didn't realize at the time what he was talking about. Left out of what? His talk of graveyards and kisses? His grotesque utterances about Sarajevo? His frequent lunches with some of the other employees, to which I was never invited? It didn't faze me.

  You must understand - I was never angry at Shane. Never. I merely understood better than anyone that we had a job to perform in the bookstore and Shane was making it more difficult to do that job.

  After nine months, the entire outline of the galley lay before anyone who cared to step around the back of our bookstore. For this reason, Shane had bought a huge tarp and thrown it across the frame. Somehow he managed to get the help of most of the other employees in pulling the tarp off when he wanted to work on the ship and then again in pulling it back on afterwards. It was probably easier to help than have to listen to Shane's messages disguised as small talk. However, I must report that the manager of our bookstore cannot be forgiven for his actions. Time and time again, even during busy periods, he would allow Shane to take breaks to work on the galley. At night, when Shane worked by flashlight and the headlights of his beat-up old car, it was even worse. Shane would be gone for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time, with our manager pretending not to notice. Shane would give any number of excuses to engage in his lazy and demoralizing behavior; our manager never saw them as excuses, though, even when I pointed it out to him. This, then, I cannot forgive, since we looked to our manager for guidance and for the strength to follow the corporate rules. Even more importantly, to keep track of the corporate rules, which were so many. (I can, in some sense, forgive Shane simply because I came to believe that it was in Shane's nature to be lazy; however, my observations of the manager had previously yielded the notion that he cared about his duties.)