The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Hazine has begun to believe that the value of such wonders should be based on something more lasting than the rate of exchange. The verdigris dome in particular has so enthralled her that she even bought a book about Smaragdine called The Myths ofthe Green Tablet, and got her cousin to send her a few old coins she keeps in a display at her bank office.

  For months now the image of the dome has come to her at night. She is floating over it and it is floating up toward her, until she's falling down through the dome and she can see, distant but ever closer: a green tablet, a ruined tower, an entire ancient city.

  This dream is so vivid that Hazine always wakes gasping, the solution to some great mystery already receding into the darkness. Friends tell her the dream is about her job, and yet it informs her waking life in unexpected ways, imbues certain people and things with vibrant light and color. She keeps the Egyptian bill in her wallet. The suggestion, the hint, of Smaragdine, is so potent, as if a place must be hidden to become real.

  Is this, then, the power of money? Hazine thinks, bringing tea and the newspaper back to bed with her in the mornings, her lover asleep and dreamless beside her.

  Chiaroscuro

  I was still searching for the missing daughter of a wealthy industrialist from Cyprus when the locals brought me in on another case. They'd heard I was staying at the Hilton - an American and a detective, in a city where neither passed through with any regularity. The police deputy, a weathered old man with a scar through his left eyesocket, made it clear that it would be best if I got into his beat-up Ford Fiesta with the lonely siren on top, and venture out into the sun-beaten city to help him.

  It was a crap ride, through a welter of tan buildings with no hint anymore of the green that had made the place famous since antiquity. The river had become a stream. The lake that it fed into was entombed in salt. The cotton they turned to as a crop just made it all worse. They'd survived a dictator, too, who had starved and disappeared people while building a monstrous palace. Becoming modern is a bitch for some people.

  The dead guy, a painter, the deputy told me, turned out to have lived on the seventh floor of what looked like a Soviet-era housing project made from those metal shelves you see at hardware stores. The smell of piss and smoke in the stairwell almost made me want to give up cigarettes again and find a bar. Most of the complex was deserted.

  The painter's place had an unwashed, turpentine-and-glue smell. Several large canvases had been leaned against the wall, under cloth. Through a huge window the light entered with a ferocious velocity. Somewhere out in that glare lay the ruins of the old city center.

  In the middle of the floor: a young man in the usual pool of blood. I could see a large, tissue-filled hole in his back. The piss smell had gotten worse. Behind him, one canvas remained uncovered on an easel.

  Against a soft dark green background so intense it hit me like the taste of mouthwash, a girl sat on a stone bench in an explosion of light. A dark complexion or just a deep tan, I couldn't tell. A simple black dress. No shoes. No nail polish. A sash around her waist that almost hid a pack of cigs shoved in at the left side. Her head was tilted, chin out, as if looking up at someone. A thin smile that could have been caution or control. The way she sat I found strange, her torso almost curved inward so that it made her seem like a puzzle piece lacking its mate. She held something even greener than the background, but someone - the murderer I guessed - had scratched it out with a knife. It could have been a book; at least, she held it like a book, although there was something too fleshy about the hints of it still left on the canvas.

  For a mistaken moment, I thought I'd found the missing girl. For a moment, I thought I'd found something even more important.

  I looked around the apartment a bit, but my gaze kept coming back to the painting. It was signed in the corner: "Farid Sabouri."

  I kept thinking, Why did they defile the painting?

  After a while, the police deputy asked me in his imperfect English, "You know what happen? Who?"

  Somewhere in this rat's warren of apartments there was probably a man whose wife or daughter the artist had been screwing. Or someone he owed a lot of money to. Or just a psychopath. You get used to the options after a while. They aren't complicated.

  I breathed in the smoky air. They weren't ever going to find the guy who had done this. Not in this country. It was still reinventing itself. Deaths like these were part of the price you paid. The police deputy probably didn't expect it to be solved. He probably didn't really care, so long as he could say he'd tried.

  "I have no fucking idea," I said. "But how much to let me take that painting?"

  Dulcimer

  From the Book ofSmaragdine, 212th Edition:

  The dulcimer has many esoteric uses in the spiritual and medical worlds. Playing the dulcimer while attaching a wresting thread to a person with a sprain will hasten the winding of the thread and the healing of the sprain. A man who plays the dulcimer over the grave of his dead wife will ensure that she stays dead and does not pay unexpected visits. A woman who plays the dulcimer holding it backwards will reverse her bad luck and bring home a wayward lover. A child who stands on one leg and attempts the dulcimer with chin and left hand while the right arm is tied behind the back will inevitably fall. If making a doppelganger using the priests' emerald powder, the dulcimer should be played during the mixing; otherwise, your monster may coalesce with a vestigial tale or tail. It is also known that playing the dulcimer after dinner increases the chance of pleasant conversation, if accompanied by wine and a nice dessert.

  Eczema

  Anyone who has seen Eczema's act for the Babilim Traveling Circus knows it is only enhanced by the equal and opposite reaction created by Psoriasis. Touring erratically throughout Central Asia and the Far East (where not banned), the circus has only rarely been captured on film or in still photographs.

  Although myths about Eczema's act abound, most eyewitnesses agree on the basics: Eczema, so nicknamed by her late father, a doctor, for the predominant condition of her formative years, enters the ring accompanied by helpers who carry several small boxes under their arms. Eczema is heavily made up in white face and wears a man's costume more fitting for a sultan, including curved shoes. A fake mustache completes the illusion. In the background a local band plays something approximating circus music.

  Eczema's assistants, dressed all in black, fan out around her. Some of them place shiny blue-and-gray models of buildings upon the floor while others arrange a variety of insects in amongst the buildings, including scarab beetles, praying mantises, and grasshoppers. Some are green or have been painted green, while others are red or have been painted red. A few flies, large moths, and butterflies weakly buzz or flutter above on long, glittering strands of hair plucked from the heads of Tibetan holy men, the leads held by specially trained insect handlers.

  Eczema stands in the background as an announcer or ringmaster comes forward and says, "The King of Smaragdine now re-creates for you, using his minions, the Great Battle between the Smaragdineans of the Green Tablet and the Turks."

  Reports differ on the battle's historical accuracy. Certainly, the Turks ruled the area around Smaragdine for some three hundred years, but records from the time are often incomplete.

  As for the act itself, some describe it as "insects wandering around a badly made scale model of an ancient city, after which the crowd rioted to show their displeasure." Others describe "the incredible sight of beetles, ants, and other insects re-creating miniature set pieces of ancient battles amongst the spires and fortifications of a realistic and highly detailed cityscape. One of the most marvelous things ever seen."

  During this spectacle, Eczema stands to the side, gesturing like an orchestra conductor and blowing on a whistle that makes no sound.

  Most accounts agree that the act comes to an abrupt end when the insects that have not escaped are swept up by the helpers. A few eyewitnesses, however, tell tales of an ending in which "huge basslike mudskippers hop on their f
ins through the cityscape, gobbling up the insects."

  Eczema then comes forward and says, in a grave tone, "What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is below for performing the miracle of one thing. And as all things were produced from one by the Meditation of one, so all things are produced from this one thing by adaptation."

  After this short speech, the audience usually leaves in confusion.

  Psoriasis does not join Eczema until the end of the act. That Eczema and Psoriasis are Siamese twins only becomes evident when they stand together and bow, and the declivity between them - that outline, that echo - tells the story of another act altogether.

  Elegiacal

  Brown dust across a gray sky, with mountains in the distance. A metallic smell and taste. A burning.

  Abdul Ahad and his sister Parveen were searching for a coin she'd lost. They stood by a wall of what was otherwise a rubble of stone and wood. A frayed length of red carpet wound its way through the debris.

  "It has to be here somewhere," Parveen said. It had been a present from her uncle, a merchant who was the only one in their family to travel outside the country.

  Her uncle had pressed it into her hand when she was eight and said, "This is an old coin from Smaragdine. There, everything is green." Her uncle made a living sometimes selling coins, but this one was special.

  The coin was heavy. On the front was a man in a helmet and on the back letters in a strange language, like something from another world. For weeks, she had held it, smooth and cool, in her right hand - to school, during lunch, back at their house, during dinner. She loved the color of it; there was no green like that here. Everything was brown or gray or yellow or black, except for the rugs, which were red. But this green - she didn't even need a photograph. She could see Smaragdine in her mind just from the texture and color of the coin.

  "I don't see it," Abdul Ahad said, his voice flat and strange.

  "We should keep looking."

  "I think we should stop." Abdul Ahad had a sharp gash across his forehead. Parveen's clothes had ash on them. Her elbows and the back of her arms were lacerated from where she had tried to protect herself from the bomb blasts.

  "We should keep looking," Parveen said. She had to keep swallowing; her throat hurt badly. She heard her brother's words through a sighing roar.

  The muddled sound of sirens.

  A harsh wind roiled down the brown street, carrying sand and specks of dirt.

  Abdul Ahad sat down heavily on the broken rock.

  Now Parveen could hear the screams and wails of people farther away. Flickers of flame three houses down the block, red-orange through the shadows of stones.

  Their father had been dead for a year. Now their mother lay under the rubble. They'd seen a leg, bloodied and twisted. Had pulled away rocks, revealing an unseeing gaze, a face coated with dust.

  Her brother had checked her pulse.

  Now they were searching for the coin. Or Parveen was. She knew why her brother didn't want to. Because he thought it wouldn't make a difference. But Parveen felt that, somehow, if she found it, if she held it again, everything would be normal again. She had only survived the air strike because she was holding the coin at the time, she was sure of it, and Abdul Ahad had only survived because he had been standing next to her.

  "You don't have to look, Ahad," she said, giving him a hug. "You should sit there for a while, and I'll find it."

  He nodded, gaze lost on the mountains in the distance.

  Parveen walked away from him, kneeled in the dirt. She stuck her arm into a gap between jagged blocks of stone, grasping through dust and gravel, looking for something smooth and cool and far away. In a moment, she knew she'd have it.

  Eudaemonic

  From the Book of Smaragdine, ist Edition:

  People from far off places ask why we worship the Green. They think of us as fools or outcasts. Yet even an ape can understand that human beings are born, live, and die. Even a beggar knows the alchemy in this basic transformation. To achieve true understanding, then, and thus true happiness, it is important to understand that transformation. Otherwise, our stay here is a ceaseless wandering, whether we roam or not.

  "Would you like to hear a riddle?

  What power is strong with all power and will defeat every subtle thing and penetrate every solid thing?

  "In giving yourself to the Green you will know what it means to search for answers to questions such as these. You will become secure in your happiness.

  "People say that we do not know what happened to the Tablet, that it has been hidden from us for a reason. But this matters not. If we fail in the finding or the reaching, should ever our own city fall and be forgotten, then still we shall be eudaemonic in the failure."

  Euonym

  That first night on the train, we were so free there was nothing to do but yell out the window at the darkness, into the cool breeze laced with honeysuckle and coal smoke.

  Our father always thought he knew the value of a good and true name. He named us Eczema and Psoriasis much as he would name a medical procedure. It was an odd choice by a sometimes secretive man. Yes, my sister and I had had disfiguring skin conditions as children, but this was so minor compared to our other problems. We were conjoined twins. Before our first birthdays, our father performed three surgeries to separate us. (In a sense, he not only named us twice, he created us twice.) Psoriasis looked as if someone had attached the male part of a puzzle piece to her side. I looked like a shark had taken a bite out of me.

  My real name was Kamilah and my sister's real name was Anbar, but our father used Eczema and Psoriasis so much that around the house in Tashkent we learned to give up those names.

  We had come to Tashkent because of our father's skill as a surgeon; despite the repressive regime, the medical facilities there were "second to none," as he liked to say. And it was at a dinner party our parents hosted for colleagues from the medical school that someone called me "Kamilah" and, for the first time, I did not respond. Who was "Kamilah"? I was Eczema. I did not realize then that I might have a third name, one I could choose myself. I was ten.

  After everyone had left the house that night, our mother berated our father for his cruelty. She was a beautiful, intelligent, tough woman who loved us too much.

  "How can you continue to call them that?" she asked him as he sat drinking scotch in the living room. "Haven't they been through enough?"

  At the time, we were having terrible trouble in school. We didn't fit in. We would never fit in.

  Our father replied, "When I was growing up, I gave myself horrible nicknames. That way nothing the other boys said could be worse."

  It was true that our father never treated anyone worse than he treated himself. A childhood disease had crippled his left arm: it was smaller and paler than his right arm. Because of it, our father was a kind of genius when he held the scalpel.

  He never told us the names he'd given himself in school. Instead, he would tell us that he had used his skills and a green powder given to him by a Smaragdinean priest to reanimate a dead woman's arm, which he then used to replace his own, "the better to perform surgery." This tall tale wasn't funny the first time he told it, let alone the twentieth, but he didn't notice our reaction.

  Another time - we must have been seventeen - we were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee with our mother, when he walked out of his study in his bathrobe.

  He smiled at us and said, "The real reason I call you what I do is that neither of you is comfortable. You never have been. Your brains are itchy - restless and curious - and there is no cure for that other than death. Never forget that."

  Then he retreated into his study, padding along in the silly mouse slippers that he'd worn for as long as I could remember.

  I would like to think that he already knew our plans and had forgiven us.

  A month later, we ran away on the train, desperate to change the reality that had been imposed on us by the world. />
  A year later we found the Green in the form of the ringmaster who called himself Hermes Trismegistus and talked like a silk ribbon tied slowly around the wrist.

  Two years and we came up with our first act for the Babilim Traveling Circus.

  Four years and we began to have a sense of what our third, our self-chosen names might be, and how we might best serve the Green and thus ourselves.

  Five years later our father died without either of us ever having had a chance to tell him any of this.

  Insouciant

  - boots smashing through brambles to the soft pine needle floor, left hand lacerated by branches from reaching out for support at the wrong moment, heart beat rapid, blood on the grip of his Glock, sharp pain in the shoulders as he whipped around long enough to get a few rounds off at an enemy that shattered in his vision because of the recoil, Lake Baikal behind him and more forest ahead and no hope in hell now of staking out the cabin where he suspected the girl was being held by the Russian toughs that had flushed him out, although he wondered as a bullet flecked a pine tree to his left and the bark exploded against his arm was the girl really there, how could he be sure and why the hell did his watch itch so badly against his sweating wrist and all the time trying not to fall, when he heard a bellowing behind him and the sound of his pursuers brought up short, followed by a cry of surprise, and he just kept running because he'd caught a hint of something green that reminded him of a painting he'd bought but didn't connect to his idea of reality, or anybody's idea of reality, and it wasn't until that moment that he realized all through the chase, until the sight of the smudge of green, that he'd been as carefree as he could ever hope to be in his line of work and how strange that was and yet so true, then tripped over something large and fleshy, fell on his side against some tree roots and, dazed, gasping for air, raised his head to find the smudge of green resolved into something so improbable that he lay there staring at it for far too long, knowing instinctively that this was part of some great mystery, a mystery he might pursue for years and never solve and yet must pursue anyway, and realizing too that because of it he would rarely know any kind of peace for the rest of his life -