Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories

by Terry Bisson

  “What about me?”

  “I’m putting you on probation, Yusef, and taking you home for dinner as soon as court is over. I want you to meet my daughter. Marshall, put the cuffs on this one and take her away. Pay no heed to her crocodile tears—they are masters of deceit.

  “Next!”

  Necronauts

  THE FIRST TIME I DIED was an eye-opener. Literally.

  I got a call from a researcher at Duke. He said he had seen my paintings in the National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines and wanted to engage me as illustrator for an expedition he was planning.

  I explained that I was blind and had been for eighteen months.

  He said he knew; he said that was why they wanted me.

  * * *

  The next morning, I was dropped in front of the university’s Psy Studies Institute by my ex. You can tell a lot about a space by its echoes, and the one I entered was drab and institutional, like a hospital waiting room.

  Dr. Philip DeCandyle’s hand was moist and cold, two qualities that don’t always go together. I form a mental picture of those I am dealing with and I saw an overweight, soft man, almost six feet tall; later I was told I was not far off.

  After introducing himself, DeCandyle introduced the woman standing beside him as Dr. Emma Sorel. She was only a little shorter, with a high-pitched voice and a cold, tentative touch that told me she was more skilled at withdrawing from the world than engaging it; a common quality in a scientist, but curious for an explorer. I wondered what sort of expedition these two could be planning.

  “We’re both very excited that you could come, Mr. Ray,” said Dr. DeCandyle. “We saw the work you did for the undersea Mariana Trench expedition, and your paintings prove that there are some things that the camera just can’t capture. It’s not just a technical problem of lack of light. You were able to convey the grandeur of the ocean depths; its cold, awesome terror.”

  He did all the talking. It was my introduction to a manner of speech that struck me as exaggerated, almost comical—before I had experienced the horrors to which he held the key.

  “Thank you,” I said, nodding first to his position and then to hers, even though she had said nothing yet. “Then you both undoubtedly also know that I lost my eyesight on the expedition, as a result of a decompression incident.”

  “We do,” said Dr. DeCandyle. “But we also read the feature in the Sun; and we know that you have continued to paint, even though blind. And to great acclaim.”

  This was true. After the accident, I learned that my hand hadn’t lost the confidence that almost forty years of training and work had built. I didn’t need to see to paint. The papers called it a psychic ability, but to me it was no more remarkable than the sketcher who watches his subject and not his pad. I had always been precise in how I lined up and laid on my colors; the fact I was still able to sense their shape and intensity on my canvas had more to do with moisture and smell, I suspected, than with ESP.

  Whatever it was, the newspapers loved it. I had discussed it in several interviews over the past year; what I hadn’t told anyone was how badly the work had been going lately. An artist is not just a creator of beauty but also its primary consumer, and I had lost heart. After almost two years of blindness, I had lost all interest in painting scenes from my past, no matter how remarkable they might appear to others. My art had become a trick. The darkness that had fallen over my world was becoming total.

  “I still paint, it’s true,” was all I said.

  “We are engaged in a unique experiment,” said Dr. DeCandyle. “An expedition to a realm even more exotic and beautiful—and dangerous—than the ocean depths. Like the Mariana Trench, it is impossible to photograph and therefore has never been illustrated. That is why we want you to be a part of our team.”

  “But why me?” I said. “Why a blind artist?”

  DeCandyle didn’t answer. His voice took on a new authority. “Follow me and I’ll show you.”

  Ignoring the awful irony of his words, and somewhat against my better judgment, I did.

  Dr. Sorel fell in behind me; we passed through a door and entered a long corridor. Through another door, we entered a room larger and colder than the first. It sounded empty but wasn’t; we walked to the center and stopped.

  “Twenty years ago, before beginning my doctoral work,” said DeCandyle, “I was part of a unique series of experiments being performed in Berkeley. I don’t suppose you are familiar with the name of Dr. Edwin Noroguchi?”

  I shook my head.

  “Dr. Noroguchi was experimenting in techniques for reviving the dead. Oh, nothing as dramatic and sinister as Frankenstein. Noroguchi studied and adapted the recent successes in reviving people who had drowned or suffered heart attacks. Learning to induce death for as long as an hour, we—I say we, for I joined him and have since devoted my life to the work—began to explore and, you might say, map the areas of existence immediately following death. LAD, or Life After Death experience.”

  My aunt Kate, who raised me after my parents were killed, always told me I was a little slow. It was only at this point that I began to understand what DeCandyle was getting at. If I had been nearer the door, I would have walked out. As it was, in the middle of a room where I had no bearings, I began backing away.

  “Using chemical and electrical techniques on volunteers, we were able to confirm the stories those who had been revived told about their spirits looking down on their own bodies; about floating toward a light; about an intense feeling of peace and well-being—all this was scientifically investigated and confirmed. Though not, of course, photographed or documented. There was no way to share what we discovered with the scientific world.”

  I had reached the wall; I started feeling along it for the door.

  “Then legal and funding problems intervened, and our work was interrupted. Until recently. With the help of the university and a generous grant from the National Geographic, Dr. Sorel and I have been able to continue the explorations that Dr. Noroguchi and I began. And your ability to paint will enable us to share with the world what we discover. The last unexplored frontier, the ‘undiscovered country’ of which Shakespeare wrote, is now within the reach of—”

  “You’re talking about killing yourselves,” I interrupted. “You’re talking about killing me.”

  “Only temporarily,” said Dr. Sorel. It was the first thing she’d said; I felt her hand on my arm and I shuddered. “Dr. Sorel has been to LAD space many times,” DeCandyle said, “and as you can see—forgive me; I mean tell—she has returned. Can it be called true death, if it is not final? And the compensations are—”

  “Sorry,” I interrupted again. Feeling behind me for the door, I was stalling for time. “What with insurance and royalties, I’m pretty well fixed.”

  “I am not speaking of money,” Dr. DeCandyle said, “although you will of course be paid. There is another and, perhaps for you, more important compensation than money.”

  I found it. The door. I was just about to go through it when he said the only words that could have turned me around:

  “In LAD space, you will once again be able to see.”

  * * *

  By two that afternoon I had completed my physical and was being strapped into what DeCandyle and Sorel called “the car” for my first mission into LAD space.

  Of all the scenes of heaven and hell and the regions between which I was to witness, the one I most wish I was able to paint is that empty-sounding room and the car that was to carry me beyond this life. All I had was DeCandyle’s description of the car. It was a black (appropriately) open fiberglass cockpit with two seats: I visualized it as a Corvette without the wheels.

  Dr. Sorel strapped me in, while DeCandyle explained that the frame contained the electroshock revival mechanism and the monitoring systems. Around my left wrist, she fastened a Velcro gauntlet, which contained the intradermal injector for the atropine chemical mix that would shut down my sympathetic nervous system.

 
In what I realized later was a shrewd psychological move, I was seated on the left: the first time I had been in a driver’s seat since I had lost my sight.

  “Give you a lift to the cemetery?” I joked.

  “You must take this first trip alone,” Sorel said; I was to learn that she had no sense of humor whatsoever. This brief orientation trip (or “LAD insertion”; DeCandyle was fond of NASA-type jargon) was supposed to be perfectly safe; it was to provide a chance for me to experience LAD space, and for them to evaluate my reaction, both physical and psychological, to induced death.

  Sorel clipped the belt over my shoulder with her big, cold hands, and I heard her footsteps walking away. I had the image of her and DeCandyle hiding behind a lead curtain like X-ray technicians. The car’s monitoring systems started up with a low hum.

  “Ready?” DeCandyle called.

  “Ready.” But I had to say it twice before the word came out.

  I felt a brief sting in my wrist. “Mr. Ray? Can you hear me now?” asked DeCandyle, who had somehow acquired a high, tinny edge to his voice, like Sorel’s. I tried to answer but couldn’t, wondering why, until I realized that the injection was working, that the trip was beginning.

  That I was dying.

  I felt an instant of panic and reached to pull off the wrist cuff, but my reflexes were slowing and by the time the impulse reached my left arm, I was too weak to lift it. Dr. Sorel (or was it DeCandyle?) was saying something now, but the voice was receding from me. I tried again to lift my hand; I can’t remember whether or not I succeeded. I felt a sudden strong sense of shame, as if I had been caught doing something terribly, irrevocably wrong; then the shame was gone. It had blown away. There seemed to be a wind blowing through the room as if a new door had opened. My skin grew cooler and seemed to be expanding; I felt like a balloon being inflated.

  In those first moments, I didn’t have the experience of which so many have spoken, of floating upward and looking down on their own bodies. Perhaps because of my blindness I had lost the impulse to “look” back. I was conscious only of floating upward, faster and faster, with no desires and nothing tying me to what was below: I felt myself dwindling, and there was a gladness in it, as if I were dwindling toward some tiny bright point which all of me had always yearned to be.

  My naturalist’s instincts, which I have carefully nurtured over the years as an essential balance to my artistic vision, were somehow missing in all this: I had no objectivity. I was what I was experiencing, which is just another way of saying there was no “me” to experience my experiencing it. Somehow this pleased me, like an accomplishment.

  It was as I was becoming conscious of this pleasure that I saw the light, a lattice of light, toward which I was floating, as if it were the surface of a pond in which I had been submerged so long, and so deeply, as to forget that it had a surface at all.

  I saw! I was seeing! It seemed perfectly natural, as if I had never stopped; and yet a great joy filled me.

  I grew closer to the light and I seemed to slow; I felt myself spinning and “looked” back, or “down.” For the first time, all in a rush, I remembered the car, my blindness, my life, the world. I saw specks floating like dust in shafts of light and wondered if that was all it had ever amounted to. Even as I puzzled over this I was turning back toward the lattice of light, which drew me toward it almost like a lover.

  In their preliminary briefing, Sorel and DeCandyle had warned of the “chill” of LAD space; but I didn’t feel it. I felt only awe and peacefulness, like the feeling one gets gazing down from a mountaintop onto a sea of clouds. Perhaps my experience was moderated by the wonderful new gift of vision; or perhaps somewhere in my bones I knew that this death was not final and that I would soon return to Earth.

  I turned back toward the lattice of light (or was it turning toward me?) and saw that it was a display of light and light, no shade. I bathed in it, floating under it with a kind of bliss that I can only compare with that of orgasm, though it lasted for a long time, never peaking, never diminishing—a never-ending climax of quiet joy.

  Was this, then, Heaven? Whether I asked that question then, or later, on reflection, I have no way of knowing; for memory and experience and anticipation were one to me then.

  “After” (there is no sense of time in LAD space) I had bathed in this glory for what seemed an eternity I felt myself drifting back, down, away from the light. The light was receding and the darkness below was growing closer. I could see both in front and behind as I “fell” and I was vaguely conscious (or did memory add this later?) of the darkness reaching up toward me, like welcoming arms.

  And I was blind again. Blind! I pulled back, toward death—and the light—and suddenly felt a sharp shock, and the outrage that pain brings. Reeling, I felt another shock; both, I learned later, were from the electroshock system built into the car, bringing me back to life.

  I was vaguely conscious of hands on my face. I tried to raise my own hands but they were tied. Then I realized they weren’t tied, but dead.

  Dead.

  To describe what I felt as “fear” understates the wave of terror that filled me. Though something—my consciousness? my soul?—had been revived, my body was dead. I had no sensation and couldn’t move. My mouth was open, but not by my own will, nor could I close it.

  It was only when I tried to scream that I realized I wasn’t breathing.

  The third electroshock came as a friend: I welcomed its violence as it ripped through me. I felt, for the first time in my life (or was this my life?), my heart stir in my breast as it clutched itself inward, sucking for blood greedily, like a child sobbing; I heard it bubbling as it filled. Then the blood flooded into my brain, ice cold, and I could hear screaming all around me.

  It was my own scream, echoing.

  * * *

  I must have lost consciousness again, or perhaps there was an injection to smooth out the reentry process. When I awoke I was breathing smoothly, relaxed, lying on a two-person wheeled gurney. It was 4:03 P.M. according to my Braille watch; only two hours since my trip had begun.

  I heard voices and sat up; a paper cup of hot tea laced with bourbon was thrust into my hand. My lips were numb.

  “That first retrocution can be rough,” DeCandyle said.

  “How do you feel?” Sorel asked, at the same time: “Are you with us?”

  I hurt all over but I nodded.

  Thus began my journey to the Other Side.

  * * *

  “There’s something creepy about those two,” my ex said when she picked me up at 5:00 P.M. as arranged.

  “They’re okay,” I said.

  “She has no chin but her nose makes up for it.”

  “They’re researchers, not models,” I said. “It’s an experiment where I paint dream-induced images. Perfect job for a blind man.” This was the agreed-on lie; there was no way I could tell the truth.

  “But why a blind man?” she asked.

  My ex is a cop. It is to her that I owe the independence I have enjoyed since the accident that blinded me. It was she who brought me home from the hospital and stayed with me, commuting daily from Durham where she works. It was she who managed the contractors and used the financial settlement from the Mariana Institute to rework my mountainside studio so that I was able to move (at first on ropes, like a puppet, and then independently) from bed to bath, from kitchen to studio, with as little hassle as possible.

  Then it was she who went ahead with the divorce she had been planning even before the accident.

  “Maybe they want somebody who can paint with his eyes closed,” I said. “Maybe I’m the only fool who’ll do it. Maybe they like my work; though I realize you would find that a little far-fetched—”

  “You should see her hair,” she said. “It’s white at the roots.” She turned off the highway up the short, steep driveway to my studio. The low-slung police cruiser scraped on the high spots. “This driveway needs fixing.”

  “First thing in the spring,” I s
aid.

  I couldn’t wait to get to work. That night, I began my first new painting in almost four months—the one that appeared on the cover of the “Undiscovered Country” issue of the National Geographic and now hangs in the Smithsonian as “The Lattice of Light.”

  * * *

  One week later, at 10:00 A.M., as arranged, Dr. Sorel picked me up at my studio. I could tell by the door handles that she was driving a Honda Accord. It’s funny how the blind see cars.

  “You’re probably wondering what a blind man’s doing with a shotgun,” I said. I had been cleaning mine when she came. “I like the feel of it even though I don’t shoot. It was a gift from the Outer Banks Wildlife Association. I did a series of paintings for them.”

  She said nothing. Which is different from not saying anything.

  “Ducks and sand,” I said. “Anyway, it’s real silver. It’s English; a Cleveland. Eighteen seventy-one.”

  She turned on the radio to let me know she didn’t want to talk; the college FM station was playing Roenchler’s “Funeral for Spring.” She drove like a bat out of hell. The road from my studio to Durham is narrow and winding. For the first time since the incident, I was glad I couldn’t see.

  I decided I agreed with my ex; Sorel was creepy.

  Dr. DeCandyle was waiting for us in the lobby, eager to get started, but first I had to stop by his office to “sign” the voiceprint contract; that is, affirm our agreement on tape. I was to join them on five “insertions into LAD space” one week apart. National Geographic (which already knew my work) was to get first reproduction rights to my paintings. I was to own the prints and the originals and get a first-use fee, plus a fairly handsome advance.

  I signed, then said, “You never answered my question. Why a blind artist?”

  “Call it intuition,” DeCandyle said. “I saw the Sun article and said to Emma—that’s Dr. Sorel—‘Here’s our man!’ We need an artist who is not, shall we say, distracted by sight. Who can capture the intensity of the LAD experience without throwing in a lot of visual referents. Also, quite frankly, we need someone with a reputation; for the Geographic, you understand.”