by Adam McOmber
The bears were chained outside the city in a gray piece of fallow known as the Gardens. Vendors in makeshift tents sold everything from salted meat to ancient sex magazines. Girls from long ago posed in those pages, chins jutting, hands on hips, skin faded to a viral green. Sometimes I pretended the girls could see us, just as we could see them, and I wondered what they must make of such foul and shambling wrecks.
My father often made me ride his shoulders on our passage through the city. One day I fell because he lurched so madly. I cut my cheek on a sharp rock. He dragged me all the way to the Gardens like that. I stood on our usual bench, blood trickling down my face. A woman said: “Don’t let Sackerson smell you, boy. He’ll pull his chain right out of the ground.” She handed me a dirty pink handkerchief stitched with roses. I pressed it to my wound.
That was the day I met Hounds, the Bear Master’s son. I’d seen him before, of course. Everyone who went to the Gardens had. He was usually too busy emptying barrels and carrying heavy pieces of cage to bother with talking to anyone, especially someone like me—the half-grown son of a Munsen Man. Women were never shy about sliding their hands over Hounds’ shoulders as he passed through the crowd. And though he didn’t seem to mind the attention, the most they ever got in return was a smile. Men admired Hounds too and were quick to make a drunken joke, which Hounds only sometimes rewarded with a chuckle. His face was plain and square. His body was big as a man’s. Pierced through Hounds’ left eyebrow was a piece of metal shaped like a tiny barbed hook.
Hounds stopped on his way through the crowd when he saw me holding the woman’s flowered handkerchief to my face. “Fancy,” he said.
I pulled the handkerchief away so as not to look like such a fool.
“Better put it back,” Hounds said. “You might bleed to death.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
“You come here to watch this sick show?” Hounds asked.
“My dad,” I said without considering how childish I sounded, “he makes me.”
“Yeah,” Hounds said. “My dad makes me too, I guess.”
Then Hounds’ father was calling him.
Hounds took his leave with barely a nod.
2.
When we got home, my older sister, June, told my father he was reckless for dragging me through the city with a cut on my face. She was tall and sickly, with stringy hair and bluish-white skin. “And what’s this filthy thing?” she said, pointing at the pink handkerchief.
Father didn’t listen to June. He never did. Instead, he went out to comb the yard for artifacts. When June and I were alone in the kitchen, I said, “I spoke to someone today.”
June’s frown looked like Mother’s. “Who, Freddy?” she asked.
“The Bear Master’s son,” I said, “called Hounds.”
“That’s not a name.”
I shrugged. “It’s what he calls himself. He’s handsome, June.”
“Handsome how?”
“Big, with a good face. You should meet him,” I said. “I could take you to the Gardens.”
June turned her back on me and started cutting a colorless pile of vegetables for dinner. “Don’t let Mayor Munsen find out you have thoughts like that.”
“Shut up,” I said. “You think too much about the stupid mayor.”
June looked hurt. And I was sorry for that.
“He might be the one who saves us,” June said. “He might be the only one who can.”
3.
That evening after dinner, June and I played a game. She covered my eyes with her cool, damp hands and asked me to remember what was in the room. “Black stove,” I said. “Coal bucket. Wooden table. Chairs. Painting of a man with a donkey.”
“Is that all?” she said.
“That’s all.”
“Did you see Mother standing there?”
“Of course not, June.”
“Then you aren’t looking hard enough, Freddy.”
That’s how she acted too. Like we weren’t all alone in the house. Like Mother was still alive.
“How much of Mother do you remember?” June asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just her face.”
That was a lie told for June’s benefit. My sister was strong, yet there were times she needed my protection. What I actually remembered was the way Mother died. As June told it, Mother had expired from a disease. And I suppose it might have looked like that to someone who found her lying on the floor. But I saw what actually happened. I couldn’t have been older than four or five. Mother fell to the floor, long dress tangled about her legs, hands kneading her gut like she was in pain. June was at the market. Father was at work. Mother called out the names of objects, most of which I didn’t recognize: electric razor, tissue paper, light bulb, filing cabinet. Mother had a habit of making these sorts of lists. Mainly she taught her lists to June, telling her that as long as we remembered the names of objects we’d never be entirely lost. Neither June nor I fully understood what she meant by lost.
Mother wound her fingers through the bars of my crib and pulled herself up to look at me. “Keyboard,” she whispered, “lava lamp, tennis shoe, my little boy.” She put her hand on my leg, squeezing too tightly. Then she started to cough, hard enough to shake the crib. That’s when the walls and floor began to darken. Like Mother was somehow dislodging shadows from her lungs.
I remember thinking we weren’t alone anymore once she started coughing. There were people in the walls and in the floor. Over the years, I’ve considered that these people might have been an invention of a mind too young to cope with a mother’s dying. Like how others believe they’ve seen angels after a public burning. But I don’t think I made them up. There were bodies there in the half-light, figures without features, figures in strange clothing, leaning in to get a better look at Mother’s death. One of them even seemed to show concern, coming close to the bed where I lay. And though I couldn’t see a face, I knew it was a woman from her shape. The shadow-woman cared about me. She seemed frightened for me. Then Mother was dead, her nose pressed flat against the floor like a nail not yet driven. The figures were gone too. And I was left alone.
4.
As I said before, Father was a Munsen Man, named after our new mayor who’d run on a ticket of reform. Munsen wore fine dark suits and used what he called “classic rhetorical hand gestures” to emphasize his words. He said soon the city gates would all be open once again, and he held a fist above his palm to make it seem true. The fallows, he said, would be cleansed—hands clasped gently in front of his chest. Every house would have electricity—palms open. Even the fallows would have electricity—palms still open. There would be no lack of food—hands prone, folded. The sick would be healed—fingers splayed, held high. And we would all learn the truth of our existence—a closed fist of reassurance. “Our dreadful night is nearly done, my fellows,” Munsen intoned with his fingers lightly steepled. Everyone cheered for him in the same way they’d once cheered for a hanging.
Father traveled the city in an orange horse cart, trying to clean the uncleanable for Mayor Munsen. He often found treasures like his “maniacal” pencil (a yellow tube that sprouted lead when you pushed on its eraser). Father brought his treasures home, hiding them in the house or even going as far as burying them in the yard. June retrieved the objects after Father had fallen asleep and tried to teach me lessons. We sat at the kitchen table, the surface of which was warped. It looked like water’s waves. She’d put her cool fingers over mine and say, “Freddy, this is important. Mother taught me, and she would have wanted you to know too. We have to remember the names because they keep us tethered to what’s real. That’s what she told me. Father thinks these things are magic. That’s why he’s lost. This is just a thimble, used for protection during sewing. And this one is called a paper’s clip, used for binding surplus. And this one,” June held up a flat chunk of plastic with numbered buttons on its surface, “was once a piece of a teliophone for talking, using networks of the air.”
<
br /> I turned the fragment of the teliophone over and looked at it. Then I put the thimble on top of it like a small hat. “Why don’t we use these things anymore, June?”
June paused. “I don’t know if we ever used them,” she said. “Maybe they leaked in from somewhere else.” She looked downtrodden. “I should have asked Mother.”
I wanted to touch her hand, but I knew I shouldn’t. She didn’t like to be touched. June had a fear of disease.
She turned her face from mine. She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was older. I should have known.”
5.
Hounds and I met again at a water barrel near the salted meat tent. Father had dragged me to the Gardens more often than usual that week. Hounds drank from a rusty ladle, then offered water to me. And though it smelled of iron, I drank heartily, if only to linger there. Hounds said, “We both got shit for fathers, Freddy. Everybody’s got shit for fathers, but you and I got the worst of the shit, you know that?”
“I know,” I said.
“You’re a good listener,” Hounds said. “Most people who got shit for fathers are good listeners. You know that too?”
I nodded.
Because there was no work for him, Hounds and I left the Gardens that day and lay in an open field to the west. We were far enough away from the bears that the cheering crowd sounded like wind. My father was drunk. I knew he wouldn’t miss me. On the horizon stood four buildings, colored the same dirty white as the sky. Their windows were shattered and looked like toothy mouths. On the one closest to me, I could read a name stamped out in large blue letters: Sanaco 1—a word that meant nothing, though it must have meant a great deal once to have been written so large. The other buildings, I assumed, were connected to the first, making them Sanaco 2, 3, and 4. These buildings were not part of the city. They were in the fallows, the spoiled land that Mayor Munsen promised to cleanse and reclaim. Hounds said his father told him the buildings had once been offices where people did business. I told him about thimbles and papers clips and teliophones of the air. He said all those things had probably been used in the offices once. When I asked him how he knew, he said, “I went over there to explore awhile back. I was sick of my dad’s shit and wanted to get away.”
“What did you see, Hounds?” I said, propping myself up on my elbow to look into his black eyes. I watched the muted afternoon light glint off the metal hook pierced through his eyebrow.
“Everything,” he said. “Piles and piles of fucking everything.”
“Artifacts?”
“Unnamed stuff,” he said.
“I bet my ma could have named those things,” I said. “She knew all the old names.”
Hounds considered this, and I hoped he might ask about my mother. The idea of telling him the story of the people who’d come from the walls and floor when she died excited me. I wanted him to know my secrets. But in the end, he didn’t ask.
“You want to go to Sanaco, Hounds?” I said. “Maybe look around together? I can tell you if I recognize anything.”
He shook his head. “Not the kind of place I’d go twice, Freddy. There was something wrong in there.”
“Wrong how?”
“The air inside was all dark, even though the sun came in through the broken windows. It was like the night had swelled up behind the day, you know what I mean? Like when you can see sickness under somebody’s skin. I kept feeling like I was going to fall down a hole, but there weren’t any holes. I had to steady myself, hold onto the wall—only the wall felt soft, like melted cheese. Like my hand might push right through it.”
“Was anybody in there?” I said.
He didn’t answer for a long time, then said, “I think maybe there was. But it wasn’t the kind of somebody that you or I could talk to.”
6.
Mostly, Hounds didn’t want to talk about Sanaco. He wanted to talk about fathers. He said that bearbaiting, his own father’s profession, was the sort of fucked-up thing that only human beings could invent. “When this place belongs to me,” Hounds said, “and it’s all gonna belong to me one day, I’ll turn it into a fucking parkland, someplace with paths where people can walk around decent-like and think, without all this shitting noise. In the middle of it all, maybe I’ll dig a big lake and put up a goddamned statue and write all the bears’ names on its chest: Sackerson, Whiting, and Stone, and fucking Harry Hunks. I’ll even write the names of the bears that died if I can remember. There used to be one called Tangle Root, you know—got her guts gnawed out by a dog. We didn’t even know she was pregnant till she was killed. And I won’t say that nobody was blind nor twins nor god of the stupid bears.”
“How’d the bears get those names anyway?” I asked.
“My old man found them in some book,” he said. “A fucked-up book of theatricals.”
I didn’t know what a theatrical was. Hounds told me it was a sort of thing where people pretended they had lives that made sense. They acted out characters who moved along the line of a story. He said people didn’t put on theatricals anymore because no one believed that life had a proper story. “They’d rather see a bear bite a fucking dog in the ass,” he scoffed. “And that’s not a plot. That’s no fucking plot at all, Freddy.”
7.
Bearbaiting worked like this—a bear was chained to a stake in the middle of the gravel circle, then two dogs were set loose upon it. Only two at first, to make the fight fair. The bear tried to stand. It swung and roared at the dogs whose jaws dripped foam as they bit the bear and dodged the massive paws until everyone on the raised benches around the arena had nearly fallen down from cheering. Once in a while, a third dog was released if the bear seemed to be too much in control. By the end of a fight, both bear and dogs alike were wet with blood. Fur stood in matted spikes. Blood ran from mouths and noses. The bears made such impotent and furious sounds that I had to cover my ears. And the dogs sounded even worse. I never knew a dog could scream until I went to the Gardens.
Hounds told me a secret as we lay on our backs in the fallows one day, ringed by the pale offices of Sanaco. I was rambling about some rumors I’d heard about Mayor Munsen. People loved to gossip about him, especially at the Gardens. They said he hadn’t been born in the city at all—that he really didn’t even know that much about our city. He came from a place where classic hand gestures weren’t uncommon and everyone wore suits like he wore, blue suits with necker-ties. Some people even said that Mayor Munsen wasn’t supposed to be in our city. His coming was against the rules. Though when asked what rules they were speaking of, they said they didn’t know. Hounds seemed distant as I spoke. He stared off into the trees around Sanaco. And just when I started talking about going against the rules, he broke in with a secret. “I’m gonna let ’em all go,” he said.
“Let what go?” I said.
“The bears,” he replied, “all the bears.”
I propped myself up, looking into his face. The bluish sun glinted off the hook in his eyebrow. “Your dad would kill you, Hounds.”
“The old man won’t have a chance.”
The breeze seemed colder then. I felt suddenly exposed there in the grass. The fallows were a dangerous place. There were people who sometimes hunted there with crossbows or came to do other things not legal within the walls of the city. Normally, I felt protected when I was with Hounds, but at that moment I understood he was not there to protect me. He was there to consider his plans.
“You’re going to let the bears run off at night?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “during one of the fights. I already figured out a way to fix the collar, the rest will just be a matter of opening cages.”
I looked down the length of him, my gaze settling on the scuffed wooden heels of his boots. He often used his boot heels to hammer cage stakes into the ground.
“The bears will hurt people,” I said.
“Don’t all these people deserve to be hurt, Freddy? Haven’t the bears been hurt so much that we can’t even look at t
hem anymore?”
I pictured the crowd at the Gardens—all those mismatched, tired faces, the jumble of salvaged clothes. I pictured them running from Sackerson, from Harry Hunks and the twins. “Your dad will just get more bears,” I said.
“He can’t,” Hounds said. “The man who got these for us died. There’s no one else who even knows where there are wild bears anymore. Hopefully, they’ll kill my old man first, anyway.”
“You mean that, Hounds?”
He acted like he didn’t hear. “I don’t want you to get hurt though,” he said. “I’ll signal to you somehow, let you know to get away. I’ll touch this—” Hounds put his finger on the hook above his eyebrow. “You can take your father with you if you want.”
Hounds’ revelation made me strangely bold. Maybe it was because death hung in the air around us. Maybe it was because I was so scared. In my mind, the crowd was already being torn apart, and I reached out and put my hand on Hounds’ smooth forearm, something I’d never dared before. His skin was warm. I could feel his blood beating beneath.
“Don’t do this,” I said.
Hounds turned slowly to look at me, and then carefully, delicately almost, he pulled his arm away.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, Hounds. I was just feeling—”
Hounds stood and dusted his jeans, an action which seemed to take forever. “You just surprised me is all, Fred,” he said finally. “People touch me. They always do, and I never know why. I just thought you were different is all.”
8.
Maybe June’s change of heart about going to the Gardens came from the fact that Mayor Munsen announced his intention to tour the fallows as part of his promised Investigations and Reforms program. June approved of the mayor greatly. She kept a drawing of him in her bedroom. Or maybe the change came merely from a new artifact Father had found: a transparent rubber breathing mask with two silver filters meant to siphon air.