by Matt Bell
And in this room: How inside a mother bear a cub might float for months before starting its arc toward birth. How it might remain a tiny bundle of cells, dividing slowly, until the bear’s body decided conditions were right, that there was enough food stored inside the sleeping mother, enough of whatever else it took to make a cub. How my wife thought of this often, this bear-knowledge she knew, as pregnancy after pregnancy we failed to fill her with what stuff she needed to bring forth our child, our children.
And in this room: the moment of the fingerling’s conception, when the half-body of my making entered the half-body of my wife’s, and how from that moment part of me grew inside part of her. And even in that moment her seeing how jealous I was, despite how I tried to hide it, from that first moment until the one months later, when the fingerling passed from her body and into my hand, where while she howled I claimed the two halves of us for myself, so that they might grow inside my flesh instead.
And in this room: the shape of that heartbreak, a slim black tear, the length of a finger.
And in this room: the fingerling’s crib, its small wooden frame, its thin pad and song-spun blanket filthied with the garden dirt.
And in this room: the times my wife touched me while I was asleep, happening here in sequence but cut away from their context, their chronology recognizable only by the changes in my body, in hers. How long she persisted. How I thought throughout that we were already estranged, that in our silences we were to come undone, unravel from our bonds. And yet in this room she ran her hands beneath the sheets, across the width of my widening back, traced her fingers through the salts of the day’s working, then wrapped her arm around the slumbering bulk of my belly, that round shape girthed heavier than that she had first married, that she then still loved.
And in this room: How I touched her too. How every time it left a mark.
AND IN THESE ROOMS, MORE component parts, more wife-shaped pieces of our past, and as we walked I decided that despite the fingerling’s insistence and my undiminished fear of the bear I would find some way to escape the bonds of my promise. I told the fingerling I would continue to pursue my wife and the foundling but not to hurt them worse, only to beggar myself before them, to bloody my knees with my apology, and the fingerling said, NO, said, WE GO NOT TO FIX THAT FAMILY BUT TO END IT.
YOU PROMISED THE BEAR, he said. YOU PROMISED ME.
You spoke with my voice, I said. You promised, and only you.
I said this, but I knew it was not true, and afterward the fingerling said nothing else, but for a time he knocked about my stomach and then the cavity of my chest and then both at once and other places besides, voice box and the clicking joint at the back of my jaw, then back down, through organs I could not feel until he hurt them, gall bladder and spleen and liver and others whose names I knew only in abstract or only when pulled from the bodies I had trapped.
The fingerling hurt me until all that remained lay prostrate on the ground, where I pleaded for him to stop, to show his father mercy, but he only twisted me worse, claimed I was no father of his—and of course if he wanted to be right, then he was right, because even if I called him my child I knew he was not, not anymore.
And in this room: The voice of the foundling as I had rarely heard it, as he talked to my wife when they were alone. A voice high and eloquent, curious and questioning, so different from the silence that blanked his wild face whenever I appeared.
And in this room: the number of times my wife hurt the foundling, even accidentally. A number so close to zero.
And in this room, the number of times the foundling touched me without fear, counted up and counted through, each enumeration instanced, made distinct: Here was the foundling wiggling his tiny fingers in his crib.
Here him clutching my then-offered finger, here him putting that finger into his mouth, biting hard.
Here the foundling crawling toward my lake-mudded boots, then his body mounted atop the mound of my foot.
Here the foundling asking me to lift him into my lap, asking me with his hands because he had not yet learned to speak.
Here the foundling pushing my hands away from his mother’s, so that he might have her instead.
Here, here, here and here and here, some few others all so similar and the same, and all when the foundling was youngest and then barely ever again.
And in this room: The foundling’s first step, first word, first loving profession. All the firsts I missed, away, sequestered with my own oldest son, ghost of might have been. This well-loved triptych of action, of sound, of affection—and what could our other son do in response but spit, but chew and gnaw every reach to which he found access.
And in this room: the many faces my wife had since made the foundling, shaped from the ruins of his old face, the one burned free by our final pot of stew. How she sang his flesh into new shapes, laid fresh expressions atop the face she had given him as an infant, and now he was a child remade in her own image, remade again and again until why bother with a name at all, because how would we recognize the one to whom it belonged?
In that room I said his name anyway, and even this did not go unpunished, and afterward the fingerling hissed: THE FOUNDLING, he said. THE FOUNDLING AND ONLY THAT. CALL HIM THAT, OR CALL HIM NOTHING.
AND BETTER NOTHING.
BETTER NEVER AGAIN.
And in this room: How bears will eat their young. How in the right anger or hunger, they will end what they have made, will strike it down with claw, will rend it apart with tooth. How a bear will swallow the bones that she birthed. How a bear will lick free the marrow that started within her. How a bear’s fur will become matted with blood that it once shared, umbilical, placental, pumped heart to heart.
And in this room: the argument that no woman would do such a thing, nor any man.
And yet this fingerling swallowed into my stomach; and yet this punishment and parenthood spread between my bones.
And in this room, in this whole final series of rooms, something else, not memory but prophecy, or else memories of the future, of the people we would be when we arrived there, or as perhaps we had already arrived, in a world where so much was made to circle, to roundabout: Her, asleep in a burning bed. Her, fevered beyond recognition. Her, waiting for me to reach her chambers. Her, not caring if I ever did or else not able to care. Her, happy with her foundling and then sending the foundling away. Her, dead or dying but only if I did nothing.
So much of what I saw there was only possibility made flesh and space, made room and what goes inside a room: all this purity of potential, all this stripping down to the elements, and now the eleventh element, named long after it had become all I had, all I hoped to see.
There were twelve elements, and the eleventh was called memory.
Memory, as all the earth was filled with, as all our bones.
Memory, an element breaking and taking apart the others, storing them away.
Memory, so that even after the other elements were gone they were still there, so that even after they were used up they were already returning.
HOW LONG I SEARCHED FOR her, and how many more rooms I entered, and as I searched how my beard widened its dishevelment, how my fingernails grew longer and more yellowed, caked beneath with dirt, with some rare fish and fowl stolen from memory-lake, from mystery-woods. How the years passed, and how much older I was after, and how rarely hungry anymore, full anyway with the stuff of my taking, with what the bear had put inside me.
How next my muscles slipped waxy down my bones. How my hair faded, star white as my wife’s eyes after they paled with her sadness, after the making of the moon and the coming of the foundling. How with no seasons there was only watch-time left to track, a circle circling circles, that mechanism passed down by my father, which had marked all the hours of his marriage until he gave it to me, at the beginning of mine.
How then my watch stopped.
How something like years passed, even with no record, and still I climbed farther downward i
nto the deep house, into its spires plunging into the depths of the earth, until at last there were no more rooms, no more passageways, only a chamber that led to the landing at the top of a great stairs, of a series of steps spiraling into a blackness that my sight could not penetrate or pierce.
Into a black, the twelfth and final element, into which I would not go.
Into a black, which unlike all the other elements had no twin I then knew upon the surface, between the dirt and the sky.
The black, awful as it was, I believed then it could be found only in caves, in lakes, at the bottom of houses, and who knew what was below it, what was waiting within?
We looked out into the darkness from atop those first widened and also taller steps, perceived the enormity yawning before us: At that depth, there was again wind, blowing up from the chasm below, and also there was something like rain, water dropping from some ceiling above, some higher height far above where the fingerling and I stood, that low spot we had descended to that was still not low enough, for it did not contain what we sought. The walls ahead were so distant as to be invisible, or else the dark was so dense that they were close but not knowable, and below us that bottomless black soared, and despite my long want I trembled, and so did the fingerling.
I was already an old man, skin flapping upon the flagpole of my bones, and still I waited as if there were more time coming, as if my clock were not run out. But after I grew restless I also grew brave, or at least brave enough to crawl on my belly to the dark end of that platform, to yell my wife’s name down into the void.
There was no answer to my many shouts, not even an echo, and how far did the drop have to be for there to be no echo? How far away the walls?
How far away my wife?
The fingerling claimed that even if she had descended these stairs into the black, she could not have survived the cold and darkness I felt from below, nor whatever worse world surely lay at such a bottom, and as I lay there, lacking the will to go on, my belly upon the freezing stone, I felt each tensile moment stretch, closed my eyes as if to sleep. But then I did not sleep, could not against the pain that followed, as the fingerling divided himself again and again, found unclaimed organs to inhabit, new stations from which to weave a plan, one befitting my increased cowardice, and when at last he spoke his voice was newly deeper, aged as I had aged.
He said, IF YOUR PURSUIT IS ENDED, THEN IT IS TIME FOR US TO LEAVE.
For an age I ceded some sliver of control, then more and more, so that I would not always have to think of what I’d done, what I knew he would compel me soon to do. And then to pretend that I could turn back, once I had stepped even one foot upon that path, but not to have to pay for my mistake, not quickly, and always to carry this reminder, this memory as an inversion of responsibility: To no longer want to fish for fish or trap for mammals. To no longer want to eat at all. To be so old already, and to feel my long life heavy upon me, upon the body that was not quite mine now that the fingerling had aged too, so that from the womb of my stomach he might grow into a ghost the shape and size of a man, or else many ghosts assembled in the shape of the same, and in my frustrated despair I let this ghost lead us upward, away from the great stairs, toward the trapdoor miles above, at the back of our first cellar, that threshold that I hoped might still exist. And also to know that it was not the father who was supposed to take orders from the son. To know that it was not the son who was meant to show the father how to exist in the world, how to be one with the qualities of its elements.
If only I had been stronger.
If only I had not pretended to believe his lie, that his plan would smoke her out, would again return her to the surface, where I might more easily beg of her what I wished to beg.
If only that, then not this: Together the fingerling and I left that landing, ascended until we reached the next-highest floor, the deepest of the deeper rooms, the last proper chamber before the climb down to the landing atop the great stairs.
There we moved as one, acted together in deed no matter how separate our reasons, and together we took kit and kindle from my satchel, sparked flames to light one of the last torches we had brought, and with it we set fire to one room after another, until the flames spread to all the deep house my wife had made, the house she had made for me.
THE SLATE AND STONE OF the walls refused to burn, but in between there were plenty of shapes that would, and so the deep house was emptied. Soon my fingers streaked and burned with the hot pitch of my torches, and if I had only begun to cough before, now I started again, my body often bent and stalled, jerking against the smoky walls of my wife’s hallways until my lungs were cleared enough to go on. When I could walk again I continued to light my fires, and as I moved away from their consumption I climbed always upward, through the rising smoke. At last I crouched along some smallest passage, and at its end I found a ladder that led to a trapdoor, an entrance to the house not previously used. Behind me I could see the flames following, and so I did not hesitate, did not turn back to look for the entrance I had previously used: With what haste I could muster I climbed past the trapdoor’s sung hinges to stand into the original cellar of our house, that cubed dirt lined with long-rotted tubers and dusty jars of what had once been fruit, and although the fire had climbed behind me it did not yet burst through. For a while I was afraid, not yet sure if it would, but like so many other elements of our world it seemed unable to cross over even the least threshold, this trapdoor’s lip up from the deep house. For some time the smoke still exited that hole and also some others, and its heat persisted for many months, a danger also made some grace, for that heat warmed the house that otherwise would have been so very cold, too frozen to hope to hold our happy living.
Returned to the house I had built, I found its rooms as empty of wife and foundling as ever, and also newly damaged, shattered upon their frames: Unguarded, our house had been visited by the bear, whose footprints now circled the house, and I found the windows smashed in by her blows, the logs of our walls tortured loose from their studs. Everywhere there was loosed fur and dried snot marking the house as no territory of ours, and then I knew what I should have suspected, that she had tried to follow us down into the deep house, that if she had fit through any of the openings leading below, then surely we would have seen her there.
What foolishness it was to return, I told the fingerling. What danger you have put us both in, and still we are no closer to your mother, to the better son that clings to her side.
To prove he could, he tortured me for my words, pressed in upon all the many nerves now at his command—and so our climb was ended by this homecoming celebrated only with weeping upon my knees, with beating my fists against the cursed dirt I found waiting outside the house, with hurling my voice at the moon-bent sky, its tortured gossamer hanging lower now than ever before.
3
ACROSS THE TREE LINE FOR the first time in years or decades, in perhaps some other longer length unreckonable as all time then was, I arrived there unprepared for the changes visited upon the woods, how its low spaces choked with rough-edged hedges, with brambles and thickets, so that all my old passages were no more. With some effort I reached the burying ground, and found within it the last fallow patch beneath the boughs and thorns, last remnant of my small incursion upon the land of the bear, where still nothing fresh would grow.
My traps had been set according to the dictates of experience and long routine, but with this new arrangement of scrub and thorn I could not easily find where I’d placed them. Warily at first, then bolder as over some days the bear failed to appear, I began to hack through the denseness of the brush until I thought I had found each trap, including some still containing the bones or part of the bones of some animal caught long ago, in the first days after I armed the steel jaws that undid them: Here a muskrat, crumbled into tiny ribs, tiny skull, here a wolf undone the same, here a trampled otter and there some fox.
I reset my traps, and each day after I visited that dark-soiled buryi
ng ground, carrying with me some new-caught wastrel nearly bare of fur and fight, and as I interred it into the cold, hard dirt, I checked again the newer graves I had earlier dug. None had been disturbed, and still there was no bear nor even any sign of her, and as I cut new paths through the trees I found I could not even find my way back to her cave, that entrance with which I was once so familiar. For a time I began to imagine that the bear had passed away in my long absence from the dirt and the woods and the lake, but the fingerling did not believe it, did not let me believe.
Long before, I had professed a belief that what a man did for his wife was to build her a house, and so in the absence of the bear and my unwillingness to leave I made some move to rebuild what had been broken, what worn-out house remained. The smoke from below had grown less strong, and the dirt even colder, and so I wrapped myself in new furs uncured and still smelling of the woods, then crossed the tree line to knock down some fresh trees from which to cut logs for our walls. It took some manner of days to drag each across the dirt, and by the time I had some sizable number beside the crooked house I realized I no longer remembered how I’d built it, or else what I did remember did not apply to rebuilding. With nothing else to do I moved from dirt to lake to woods to house to cellar, where often when I could not sleep I sat above the trapdoor to the world below, breathing in the fading smoke-smell and expelling it back out, calling my wife’s name down into the dark, a repetition of my cowardice atop the great stairs, repeated until my breath came slower and harder, until my voice was choked silent, my lungs packed with the fingerling’s thick shapes, their oily jelly.