The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  A year had passed when Shane announced at an employee function at the local tavern that the initial phase of work had ended on his precious galley. "Thank you for your help," he said. "Thank you for your good wishes. Thank you for not firing me," he said, and gave a nod to the manager, who grinned ear-to-ear, looking for all the world like something hideous from the cover of a book in our Nature section.

  To which Shane Statements (as I'd taken to calling them behind his back), to their credit, his fellow employees gave only a tepid smattering of applause, even, might I say, to the trained ear, a mocking amount of applause. This did not depress him. It did not affect him at all. He acted as if they loved him, and loved his "sacred task," as he had taken to calling it whenever I was around. Nothing, I can see now, would have stopped him, short of death. For whatever reason, the boat was locked into his thoughts in a way that I would never understand. I am not by nature obsessive.

  When I saw that Shane's Folly would not soon end, I began to accept the world he had created for us - but accept it only so I could shatter it and return us to the state in which we had existed Before Shane (or B.S., as I called it when talking to my fellow employees). I began to think of the bookstore as a ship and all of us as its sailors, guiding it from safe port to safe port. In that light, it was clear that Shane had called for a mutiny, a term I was familiar with from my work shelving books in the History and Sports sections. Not only had Shane called for a mutiny, but our manager had joined the mutiny! I began to sort my employees by those who appeared to be listening to the teachings of the Shane and those on whom his siren song seemed to have no effect. It was a difficult process I had undertaken, and one that I eventually hoped would be documented in a company report. Unfortunately, one of those Leaning Shane crumpled up my notes on a particularly difficult evening in the bookstore, some 17 months into the period of Shane's Folly, and tossed them in a waste basket. I have only my memories, as a result, although I am happy, at some future time, to reconstruct whom I suspected of mutiny, even though it may no longer matter.

  The only effect of my change in worldview, I see now, was to distance myself from the loyal employees who still remained, and for this I bear full responsibility. Most of them took my interrogations and probings in the gracious spirit with which I offered them. However, some did not see my work for what it was. If I had to do it over again, I might have stayed more within the powers of my assistant managership, for twice the manager of the store reprimanded me for what he said was "intrusive and inappropriate behavior."

  I couldn't take him seriously, of course. How could I? He had gone in with Shane and the rest of them. Now it was not just Shane saying things about Sarajevo, it was other employees, although, as is the way with statements handed down, they became changed by the time I heard them from the other employees. One employee, a girl I rather liked until that moment, said, as we stood at the cash register, "I wonder if it's snowing where Sara is." "Sara?" I said. "Who is Sara?" "No one," she said, gazing with a strange, strange look on her face out the window. It wasn't until later that I caught the odd similarity.

  By this point, 17 months and 2 weeks into Shane's Folly, the galley was finished. He had painted it, added caulking, furnished the galley, and even - of all the audacious things! - let some of the employees "ride" in the boat and practice pulling on the oars. They all, including the manager, seemed in awe of this oddity Shane had created; Shane himself seemed awed by it. Now all Shane was doing, it seemed, was waiting. As was I. 1 had by then decided all I could do was watch and wait and record, so that if a report was required by corporate HQ, I could provide one, as I am now doing. I am not violent by nature, nor persuasive; I am a simple assistant manager, devoted to the company, and to the idea of our bookstore. What else could I do? I could not stop Shane, although I was fairly sure Shane would stop himself.

  So Shane waited. One day, 17 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days since he had started, I overcame my mental objections long enough to stand in front of the galley with Shane. It glistened in the morning sun and the sail whipped in the wind. The sail had a huge "S" in red on it. What it stood for was not immediately clear to me. It could have stood for Shane, or it could have been a mocking "Sarajevo," intended to get to me. The whole thing looked like a hideous monster made of wood, and no doubt un-seaworthy to boot. We were, after all, in the middle of Iowa. What could any of us possibly know about building boats like this one? Especially using an old coin to design it?

  "What are you waiting for?" I asked Shane.

  Shane stood there with his hands in his pockets, smiling up at his folly.

  Then he stared at me, with what I can only call ill intent, and he said, "I'm waiting for the girl I kissed in the graveyard. Once she gets here, I'm gone. Because you know" - and as he said it I could hear the laughter in his voice, and the echo, as if he had been waiting for this moment for a long time - "Because you know, I'll bet it isn't snowing in Sarajevo now."

  I'm afraid I broke down. I'm afraid almost i8 months of this nonsense had gotten to me. I turned red. I stood there, trying to control myself, but could not.

  "You bastard!" I said. "You complete and utter bastard! What the hell are you talking about?! What can you possibly mean?! Why did you build this ridiculous ship? Why does the manager like you so much? You bastard! Bastard!"

  After a while, I could not stop saying bastard, although after a time I could not look Shane in the eyes anymore, and my "bastard" became a groan and then a mumble and then a whisper. By the time I had stopped, Shane had gone inside, no doubt to spread more mutiny and to tell the employees who reported to me about my little episode.

  I admit, it was a clear violation of corporate policy for assistant managers - but it was in direct response to Shane's own violation of hundreds and hundreds of corporate policies, repeatedly flaunted day after day, minute after minute, for months and months and months. What else could I do? My own mouth knew it had to mutiny against this mutiny.

  But when I went back inside, no one would talk to me, not even the manager, not even to reprimand me. And that is when I knew beyond any doubt how far things had gone.

  Exactly i8 months after Shane started his little project, his folly, his insanity, he disappeared along with the Roman galley built using an image on a coin as his guide. It is believed that he took all of our bookstore employees with him, including the manager. When I got into work that dreary Monday morning, I had to open the bookstore myself. At first, I thought there must have been some emergency, someone from the bookstore in the hospital. But no: when I unlocked the back door to prepare for the daily delivery of books via truck, I saw the truth. The ship was gone. They must have gone with it. The first thought that went through my head was actually a series of images: of a girl, of a graveyard, of Shane, of Sarajevo, a place I'd never been. The second thought was an actual thought, a treacherous one: a sudden pang in my heart, a sudden pain there - that I had been forgotten, that they all had abandoned me here, in Iowa, in our bookstore, while they'd left.. .for where? As you know, it is still unclear, which is why you have asked for this report. To stop it from happening again? To explain what happened at our store? To track down Shane wherever he might be? This is unclear to me, too.

  But I know my thought, my pain, was just the last poison Shane brought to us making its way to the surface - my body, my brain, betraying me to Shane's mutiny, just for a second. Just for that second when part of me wanted to join them. I know that now, and I have consulted the corporate policy book many times for guidance on how to stop it from ever happening again to me. I know it is not behavior appropriate in an assistant manager, even if it constitutes a betrayal by thought not deed.

  I suppose what bothers me the most, though, is the simple mystery behind what Shane said and the way in which Shane's encounter in a graveyard will not leave me, and the way in which I still, now, six months after the disappearance, see that huge sail in my dreams, flapping in a sudden breeze. I wish I could stop thinking about it.

>   That's all I know. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to ask. I am happy to try to answer them - as much for my own benefit as for yours.

  THE SURGEONS TALE

  (with Cat Rambo)

  1.

  Down by the docks, you can smell the tide going out - surging from rotted fish, filth, and the briny sargassum that turns the pilings a mixture of purple and green. I don't mind the smell; it reminds me of my youth. From the bungalow on the bay's edge, I emerge most days to go beachcombing in the sands beneath the rotted piers. Soft crab skeletons, ghostly sausage wrappers, and a coin or two are the usual discoveries.

  Sometimes I see an old man when I'm hunting, a gangly fellow whose clothes hang loose. As though his limbs were sticks of chalk, wired together with ulnar ligaments of seaweed, pillowing bursae formed from the sacs of decaying anemones that clutter the underside of the pier's planking.

  I worry that the sticks will snap if he steps too far too fast, and he will become past repair, past preservation, right in front of me. I draw diagrams in the sand flats to show him how he can safeguard himself with casings over his fragile limbs, the glyphs he should draw on his cuffs to strengthen his wrists. A thousand things I've learned here and at sea. But I don't talk to him - he will have to figure it out from my scrawls when he comes upon them. If the sea doesn't touch them first.

  He seems haunted, like a mirror or a window that shows some landscape it's never known. I'm as old as he is. I wonder if I look like him. If he too has trouble sleeping at night. And why he chose this patch of sand to pace and wander.

  I will not talk to him. That would be like talking to myself: the surest path to madness.

  I grew up right here, in my parents' cottage near the sea. Back then, only a few big ships docked at the piers and everything was quieter, less intense. My parents were Preservationists, and salt brine the key to their art. It was even how they met, they liked to tell people. They had entered the same competition - to keep a pig preserved for as long as possible using only essences from the sea and a single spice.

  "It was in the combinations," my dad would say. "It was in knowing that the sea is not the same place here, here, or here."

  My mother and father preserved their pigs the longest, and after a tie was declared, they began to see and to learn from each other. They married and had me, and we lived together in the cottage by the sea, preserving things for people.

  I remember that when I went away to medical school, the only thing I missed was the smell of home. In the student quarters we breathed in drugs and sweat and sometimes piss. The operating theaters, the halls, the cadaver rooms all smelled of bitter chemicals. Babies in bottles. Dolphin fetuses. All had the milky-white look of the exsanguinated - not dreaming or asleep but truly dead.

  At home, the smells were different. My father went out daily in the little boat his father had given him as a young man and brought back a hundred wonderful smells. I remember the sargassum the most, thick and green and almost smothering, from which dozens of substances could be extracted to aid in preservations. Then, of course, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, tiny crabs and shrimp, but mostly different types of water. I don't know how he did it - or how my mother distilled the essence - but the buckets he brought back did have different textures and scents. The deep water from out in the bay was somehow smoother and its smell was solid and strong, like the rind of some exotic fruit. Areas near the shore had different pedigrees. The sea grasses lent the water there, under the salt, the faint scent of lemons. Near the wrecks of iron-bound ships from bygone eras, where the octopi made their lairs, the water tasted of weak red wine.

  "Taste this," my mother would say, standing in the kitchen in one of my father's shirts over rolled up pants and suspenders. Acid blotches spotted her hands.

  I could never tell if there was mischief in her eye or just delight. Because some of it, even after I became used to the salt, tasted horrible.

  I would grimace and my father would laugh and say, "Sourpuss! Learn to take the bitter with the sweet."

  My parents sold the essence of what the sea gave them: powders and granules and mixtures of spices. In the front room, display cases stood filled with little pewter bowls glittering in so many colors that at times the walls seemed to glow with the residue of some mad sunrise.

  This was the craft of magic in our age: pinches and flakes. Magic had given way to Science because Science was more reliable, but you could still find Magic in nooks and crannies, hidden away. For what my parents did, I realized later, could not have derived from the natural world alone.

  People came from everywhere to buy these preservations. Some you rubbed on your skin for health. Some preserved fruit, others meat. And sometimes, yes, the medical school sent a person to our cottage, usually when they needed something special that their own ghastly concoctions could not preserve or illuminate.

  My dad called the man they sent "Stinker" behind his back. His hands were stained brown from handling chemicals and the reek of formaldehyde was even in his breath. My mother hated him.

  I suppose that is one reason I went to medical school - because my parents did not like Stinker. Does youth need a better excuse?

  As a teenager, I became contemptuous of the kind, decent folk who had raised me. I contracted a kind of headstrong cabin fever, too, for we were on the outskirts of the city. I hated the enclosing walls of the cottage. I hated my father's boat. I even hated their happiness with each other, for it seemed designed to keep me out. When I came back from my studies at the tiny school created for the children of fishermen and sailors, the smell of preservatives became the smell of something small and unambitious. Even though poor, the parents of my schoolmates often went on long journeys into the world, had adventures beyond my ken. A few even worked for the old men who ran the medical school and the faltering mages' college. I found that their stories made me more and more restless.

  When the time came, I applied to the medical school. They accepted me, much to the delight of my parents, who still did not understand my motivation. I would have to work for my tuition, my books, but that seemed a small price.

  I remember a sense of relief at having escaped a trap. It is a feeling I do not understand now, as if my younger self and my adult self were two entirely different people. But back then I could think only of the fact that I would be in the city's center, in the center of civilization. I would matter to more than just some farmers, cooks, fisherfolk, and the like. I would be saving lives from death, not just preserving dead things from decay.

  The day I left, my father took me aside and said, "Don't become something separate from the work you do." The advice irritated me. It made no sense. But the truth is I didn't know what he meant at the time.

  His parting hug and her kiss, though, were what sustained me during my first year of medical school, even if I would never have admitted it at the time.

  The brittle-boned old man stands at the water's edge and stares out to sea. I wonder what he's looking at, so distant. The sargassum's right in front of him, just yards from the shore.

  That's where I stare, where I search.

  As a medical student, I lost myself in the work and its culture, which mainly meant sitting in the taverns boasting. I had picked up not just a roommate but a friend in Lucius, the son of a wealthy city official. We roamed the taverns for booze and women, accompanied by his friends. I didn't have much money, but I had a quick tongue and was good at cards.

  Many long nights those first two years we spent daydreaming about the cures we would find, the diseases we would bring to ground and eradicate, the herbs and mixes that would restore vitality or potency. We would speak knowingly about matters of demonic anatomy and supposed resurrection, even though as far as anyone knew, none of it was true. Anymore.

  Lucius: They had golems in the old days, didn't they? Surgeons must have made them. Sorcerers wouldn't know a gall bladder from a spoiled wineskin.

  Me: Progress has been made. It should be
possible to make a person from some twine, an apple, a bottle of wine, and some catgut.

  Peter (Lucius' friend): A drunk person, maybe.

  Lucius: You are a drunk person. Are you a golem?

  Me: He's no golem, he's just resurrected. Do you remember when he began showing up? Right after we left the cadaver room.

  Lucius: Why, I think you're right. Peter, are you a dead man?

  Peter: Not to my knowledge. Unless you expect me to pay for all this.

  Lucius: Why can'tyou bea resurrected woman?Ihave enough dead malefriends.

  During the days - oh marvel of youth! - we conquered our hangovers with supernatural ease and spent equal time in the cadaver room cutting up corpses and in classes learning about anatomy and the perilous weakness of the human body. Our myriad and ancient and invariably male instructors pontificated and sputtered and pointed their fingers and sometimes even donned the garb and grabbed the knife, but nothing impressed as much as naked flesh unfolding to show its contents.

  And then there was the library. The medical school had been built around the library, which had been there for almost a thousand years before the school, originally as part of the mages' college. It was common knowledge, which is to say unsubstantiated rumor, that when the library had been built thaumaturgy had been more than just little pulses and glimpses of the fabric underlying the world. There had been true magic, wielded by a chosen few, and no one had need of a surgeon. But none of us really knew. Civilization had collapsed and rebuilt itself thrice in that span. All we had were scraps of history and old leather-bound books housed in cold, nearly airless rooms to guide us.