by Matt Bell
THE BEAR DID NOT SPEAK precisely, could not form the mouth-shapes necessary to make the words of our language. I moved to make some response to her roarings—this speech so unlike my own yet somehow translated by the fingerling—but that ghosted son moved first, marshaled his new shapes to possess some smaller set of tools, my tongue numbed as he muscled behind it his own wet weight. As he spoke he swam from my head to my heart to my many other hurts, and then to all of them at once, something he had not before been able to do, and even as I struggled to understand the bear I also feared to know the powers this new ability portended: The fingerling’s securing of my shoulder—and the snapping that had followed—had done him some damage, and now he was not just one shape but many. In each of the wrong and wounded spaces within me, some fingerling came up to call a chorus, to give voice to WHAT NOW, to WHAT NEXT, to WHAT COWARD, WHAT COWARD—and how I tried to ignore him, the many of him there were, and how he expanded everywhere against my shattered nerves, so that I might not.
I followed the bear into the mouth of her cave, where my wife and I had made our temporary home, then we descended after her into the deeper tunnels, where I had searched for my wife after I first saw the bear, when my wife disappeared into the earth for some hours or days. Together we went deeper still, but always along the main path, ignoring the branching side halls and rubbled chambers I saw spiraling away into the dark. In that structure there were no doors, only loose pilings of stones, and through their impermanent barriers I did spy some snatch of what lay there, stolen away: Here one of my traps, there a ripped and discarded skirt my wife had thought well lost.
Soon we arrived in the chamber where I assumed the bear had hibernated, where presumably she had been asleep when we first came to the dirt to build our house—or at least that theory accounted for the long habitation evident in that chamber, with its layers of bedding, of bent and torn bones, near fossils. Here too there were some scraps of fabric, ripped shreds of paper that might have belonged to us, or anyone else like us, and everything in that chamber smelled of the bear—urine and rot and feces, dank and fetid, damp fur and dug dirt and stalest milk—and while I continued to be curious about what I had found, I did not have much longer to look.
The bear placed before me some small bundle of furs, and I needed no imagination to recognize their origins. She unfolded them with her paws, opened them below my slumped body, and then after she retreated I knelt in the space she allowed and gathered the furs into my arms: Here was snout and claws attached to more fur, thick fur lined underneath with fat, all somehow still fresh, ready again to be the makings of a better-made bear than the one before me. The linger of my wife’s perfume remained, proof enough that it was indeed my wife who had song-skinned the bear’s cub, and while the bear watched, I rubbed my fingers down the seams of her cub’s separation, feeling for the places where he had ceased to be a bear, a connection severed as he became a boy, birthed out of this child already alive, already once made flesh from flesh.
The bear roared and then roared again, and in this roar I saw her cave before we came to it: How deep beneath the woods the bear slumbered then, and within her the cub, some drifting egg, some fertilized idea, unplanted.
And in this roar, more worries, that if she was disturbed before her cub was born, then he might not be born at all, or might be born in the wrong place, where he would not survive; that if the coming of her cub did not cause her to stir, then there would be a time when the cub was awake and alone in the cave, vulnerable.
And in this roar, why she put her den so low, why the entrance of her cave was so complicated, the tunnels deeper so distracting, dazing enough that some simpler thief might have lost her way, might have sought instead some easier prize to steal—but not my stubborn wife, not this mother capable only of ghosts, who would one day want more than anything a baby of her own, a baby she might give to me.
And in this roar, how after we came my wife crept downward through the bear’s tunnels, filling her boredom and loneliness with exploration, while on the dirt I toiled with my hands to raise us our house.
And in this roar, how my wife first found the bear, long asleep, long pregnant as my wife would one day wish to be pregnant. And in this roar, how my wife had placed her hands upon the bear’s swelled season, her stomach still full-furred in those days, and how my wife had held her hands there until she felt the four-footed kick of the cub.
And in this roar, what happened next, the first split of the bear’s own fur, the first growth of bone or shell to cut its way out, wounds made by my wife’s songs, by their desperate and varied attempts to slow the bear, to speed my wife’s escape after she was caught.
And in this roar, the too-early labor of the bear caused by the same, her cub loosened by the bear’s chase of my wife, by her premature return to the woods, to the tree line where I saw her for the first time.
And in this roar, how the bear tried to return to sleep, to slow the cub’s coming, how in her dreams she believed it a thing done, and yet how as she slept the cub did come.
But first how her strange pregnancy seemed to take years, the bear thought or else dreamed, and still the cub was born too soon after the bear’s angry pain, her destruction of our cargo, her retreat into the depths: her cub then a tiny thing, unable to care for himself, but with a dozing mother too hurt to nurse him right, unable to do anything but sometimes sing some simplistic bear-song, a lullaby meant to slow his growth until the bear could be made right, well healed enough to mother him.
How one day when the bear awoke, her slowed cub was gone, and she did not know where he had gone.
And then this last roar, all the truth left to tell: The bear told me that the father of her child was a bear. She told me that the father of her child was not a bear. She told me that the father of her child was here. She told me the father was not here. She told me that the father of her child was nowhere, and also everywhere, as long as everywhere did not extend to the other side of the lake, the other side of the mountains, that rich earth where things were less simple than they were upon the dirt or within the woods or beneath the lake, and so perhaps there was even more that was possible, more than she remembered.
Perhaps, she roared or, rather, not the word but what words I heard in the sound: Perhaps, but even if that was so then still that was not the way here. And in her voice I heard something so like the voice of my wife, some similar tone to that with which she had told me how we would make the dirt our own, how with new rules we would shape from it the world we wanted.
The bear woke me from my memories with more of her voice, and then she told me that upon the dirt between the lake and the woods, always there were two that appeared, and always the two made a single child.
She told me that now there were four, and too many children besides, because ours was both boy and cub, and perhaps none of the four was set upon the right place, nothing shaped as it should be shaped, and when she was done telling me this she told me what she thought should be done to put our world to right—what should be done to my wife and to one other—so there might be a right number of each, of male and female, mother and father, parent and child.
With loud and quiet roars, with a variety of vocalizations I had never heard before, a bear-song simpler than our own speech but supple enough for possible truth, she told me that if I would return her cub to her—and if I would also punish my wife for taking him—then she would take care of the other, my own complement I had not yet met, and afterward the numbers would be better balanced, as always they had been intended.
I nodded as I listened, but I knew she was not quite right, for in all her calculations she did not count the fingerling. He was my secret alone, and so long as he was within me, then there was no proper math.
THE BEAR’S CARAPACE SHIVERED, HEAVED. She lowered her shoulders to the ground, then motioned with the wedge of her head that I might climb up. I searched for purchase among her bones, dug out handfuls of fur and slipped flesh before finding pro
montories on which to make my nervous clenching, and after I was right-straddled atop her the bear leaped out of her chamber, climbing sure and swift into and up and through the deep tunnels to the surface. Outside her cave, the bear charged through the woods, whipped through branch and thorny bramble until my face and arms were scratched and scraped, each new blemish drawing what blood remained, and before I could voice any complaint we were arriving, already back at the burying ground.
There the bear slowed, circled once, then stopped and stood upon her hind legs, raising her half-furred face above her shoulders so that as she ascended I fell from her back, landed hard. Freed of her burden, she remained standing to howl at the moons, which at first continued their slow arc unfazed by what sound she hurled at their shapes, no matter how she carried on.
Frustrated, the bear lowered herself, then stood to howl once more, and this time I thought I saw my wife’s moon shake in its circuit.
And so again I said that I would do as I had been asked, this time in my own voice: I would enter the house, I would seek out my wife, and in the deepness I would convince her to give up the foundling.
OR ELSE TAKE HIM FROM HER, said the fingerling, from out of my mouth, and then again the bear shook its hackles, again it roared until all the woods and my wife’s moon shook around us, and still there came more sound from the bear, more spit-flecked thunder and command, and then from the surrounding graves came that exodus I knew nightly happened but which I had never before seen. As I watched, broken-boned deer and elk and moose pushed forth from the forest floor, and then cougars and muskrat, wolves and coyotes, beavers and squirrels and rabbits and skunks and chipmunks and wild goats and boars, partridge and pheasant and peacock and grouse and all other manners of beast and bird, each called by the bear from whatever shallow place I had buried its shell. I recoiled as they stumble-rushed into the thickets or failed to take flight, for all the wrongs I had done now came past me on all sides, their injuries grotesque, and yet how I would commit the same wrongs again, how I knew I would: The wants that had prompted me to break their bones and beaks, to rip their fur and feathers, to taste their oddest parts, none were resolved, and when I was remade I too might be less than I was.
The bear knocked me flat with the heavy paddle of her paw, then held me against the soft-flipped dirt: With tooth and claw she undressed me until I was naked and then again until I was stripped of my nakedness. My wounds oozed, fed the roots below, and when I was empty of blood I took one more breath and then I was empty of that too, and as I suffered, the bear breathed herself into my unskinned body, filling me with her coughs and her wheezes and also her musk, her wild smell which ever after leaked from my pores.
Within the bear’s heated speech, I heard her melody, like that of my wife’s but simpler, without proper words, and with that sound the bear scabbed each wound, filled each divot with song-made flesh, as my wife might have done to make her foundling. This new body, it was meant to last the long journey ahead, that departing beneath the dirt to which we had agreed, and with its completion the fingerling grew excited from his many perches—and in that moment I became something else, other than what I had been—some not-quite-husband, a dream of the bear, as the bear was perhaps the dream of the woods, of the cave beneath, set in motion toward what she wanted most, toward what I or the fingerling had agreed, a pact without which she would not have rebuilt this body upon my bones: I would enter the deep house, and there I would find my wife and convince her to give up the foundling and also to again skin him as a bear using his right and previous fur, which I would carry with me into the earth. In return we would not be punished for our crimes, neither me nor my wife, and so we might be free to leave the dirt, escape back around the lake, to our fathers’ country over the mountains, or else to some other distant land, like this one but also better emptied.
We would be saved, the bear promised—but if my wife would not give up the foundling, then I was to take him by deception or blood, and then when I returned there would be other rewards, if I chose to remain to receive them.
For this and less I betrayed our marriage, as slim threaded as it then was, and for this I am ashamed, and yet in my defense what can I say but this: Without that betrayal, how else would I have gained the strength to descend into the deep house, to seek the reunion that could only happen within those long halls, those strange chambers slung toward the bottom of those steepest stairs, spiraling down.
BUT FIRST WINTER CONTINUED UPON the dirt, and sunless days too, and as I watched, my wife’s moon dug hollow the night sky, so that what few stars existed must have lived only in the short margins of our steep-sloped horizons, starved of their long circuits, the vacuum they’d before been free to roam. All our atmosphere filled with clouds heavy with rain and snow and sleet and hail, their darkness above us, and yet it never rained or snowed or sleeted or hailed, the strained sky making nothing more than a terrible buzzing, heard whenever I looked up at its unturned arc, and for some time I did not see the bear again, but sometimes I saw her footprints, marked all over the rough dirt—and then, after she sickened further, not footprints but some new dragging, a scrape instead.
The footprints led often past the house and toward the lake, but the scrape appeared motioned in the opposite direction, wet from the water, then from the blood leaking out of the bear from the shore to the dirt to the woods. I wondered if all I had to do to save my wife was to wait for the bear to die, but the fingerling denied even this hope: NO, he said, THE BEAR’S DEATH CHANGES NOTHING, AND STILL THERE WOULD BE THE FALLING MOON.
The fingerling commanded me out of the house and down the slippery glass of the path to the lake, following the scrape to the salted shores of our beach, where we came upon some enormous mass the likes of which I had never imagined, all of its blubbered weight rent unrecognizable by claws and teeth some time before, then left to float, to bob up and down upon the waves until at last it had stranded there in the night, brought high onto the beach by the strange tides our two moons had wrought. What was it that so deeply hurt the bear, what was it that she had killed? For long minutes I stared, unable to make sense of what I saw. It shared no shape I already knew, was instead all shapelessness all over, made punished flesh or cracked mantle or torn appendages, and before its bloated stench all my guesses seemed wrong.
And I wondered: What were the bounds of its shapelessness?
Was it shapeless like a squid, or shapeless like a whale?
THE NEXT TIME I STEPPED across the threshold of my house I shut the door behind me, locked it tight against the dirt. The door’s key swung chained from my neck, then went tucked inside my clothes, over my heart, cold among the hair and the gooseflesh. In haste, so that I might not lose my slight courage, I gathered the few provisions I thought I would need, a single satchel’s worth: only some salted and smoked fish, my gas-lamp and torches and flint, a soon-useless ball of string; the skinning blade; and also what the fight with the bear had won me, the writhing cub-fur with which I was to confront my wife, which I was to guilt her into again clothing the foundling inside.
MEMORY AS FIRST EXPLORATION OF the deep house, as this progression of rooms: To follow the many staircases down to the many landings, the many hallways branching out from behind progressively heavier doors.
To open the first rooms and find the deep house made now a palace of memory, a series of rooms in which what I had forgotten had been curated, collected together with what I had tried to forget, and also with other moments that had occurred only in dreams, or else not at all, not for me.
To find in each room some unadorned spectacle, my wife or me or us together, with or without those children we had failed to have, plus the one she had stolen, that she had passed off as our own. Or not passed off, but made true: It was in those passages that I saw how even if I had not accepted the foundling into my family, still my wife had accepted him into hers, put him at its center, a space I believed I had once occupied, and so our house was divided, and then divided agai
n and again, because what house might stand against a child loved by only one parent, when the jealous other held that same child in suspicion and contempt?
And how for me the fingerling remembered everything.
How the fingerling saw even what I would have left undiscovered, what I did not want to share with him or any other child.
How even then he rode most often in my belly, in my thigh, in my throat, so that he might always be close to the skin, soaking in the new airs I moved my body through. And so he was there too in each of those many rooms, where otherwise there would have been only me, always me, me lonely and me alone among the tiny domains of my wife, sung into being as she passed, echoed throughout the deepening dirt.
In the first room I found piled the cargo we lost to the bear: Here again were the broken vases and cracked crystal, the shattered punch bowls, the punched-out platters.
Here were the shredded rags of my wife’s dress, and beside them my boutonniere, meant to be preserved inside a translucent bubble, now freed from where it had been glassed.
Here was the intricate mechanism of a handmade clock, gifted and then broken, stopped as all other clocks were eventually stopped.
All these objects, seemingly each its own but merely parts of a whole, what in the cave we had lost.
And in this room: her wedding ring, discarded. She had improved everything I had given her but not this, and so its simple band remained only what it had ever been. I held the ring in my hand, and then I took off my own ring, and I laid both upon the stones, touching. Rings had been insufficient to fasten us together, and it would take more than rings to rebind what had been broken.