by Matt Bell
Below the limits of the house, I knew my wife’s nested structure was far greater, extending even past what I had seen on my last descent. Surely the bear already roamed somewhere among those rooms, waiting between the surface and the great stairs, mad with what she had done, what I was sure she would claim I’d made her do. Soon I would be on my way to meet her, and when I did it would be with the shrouded death of her cub in my arms, with the skins of his first-meant childhood strapped to my back, and I did not yet know what I would say when next we met.
And how I would have to be ready.
And how when I lifted the foundling into my arms, the fingerling objected, saying, OR JUST THROW IT IN THE LAKE.
And how I never would be ready.
ABANDON IT IN THE WOODS OR IN THE GARDEN OR IN THE ROOMS OF THE HOUSE.
And how I had never known what right thing to say or do, to her or to anyone else.
I DO NOT CARE WHERE YOU LEAVE IT, he said. BUT DO ANYTHING BUT BRING IT ALONG.
And how when that meeting came I would speak and act anyway, as always I had done before.
EVERYWHERE THERE WAS THE CHAR and charcoal of our ruined wedding presents, of the memory of them, and also pools of rainwater and clods of sod and fallen walls and piled rubble. I picked through those first unceilinged rooms, then the darker halls below, curious for what remained, but so little held any useful shape or other dimension that soon we moved on, downward and farther in, through room after room, and though I did not forget their contents I also did not linger long between their walls.
And in this room, a silence that had once been a song.
And in this room, a light that had once been lightning.
And in this room, a heat that had once been a fire.
And in this room, a lump of silver that had once been a ring, two rings.
And in this room, the taste of burned hair. And in this room, its smell.
And in this room, the carapaces of bees, long ago emptied.
And in this room, a wine bottle, full of the leavings of maggots but not maggots.
And in this room, a broken bowl of mirrors, reflecting nothing.
And in this room, a filthy red ribbon, for putting up a woman’s hair, for tying it back.
And in this room, unwashed seeds split by fire, revealing the expectant sprouts inside, now doomed and dried.
And in this room, a sensation like the slight give of a bruised thigh, when pushed in upon by a thumb.
And in this room, a sound that might have been my wife’s voice, just too far off to hear.
And in this room, a chunk of moon rock, still hot, and above it a shaft of light lifting five stories to a jagged hole in the surface, to the other moon’s light pouring down.
And in this room, the spokes of a bassinet, a blanket buried beneath a caved-in ceiling.
And in this room, a trowel stained dark, used once for digging twice.
And in this room, a rag, brown with blood, with layers of old blood.
And in this room, the sound of a star hitting the earth.
And in this room, the louder sound of a moon, of part of a moon.
And in this room, a staleness of spilt milk.
And in this room, the slime and the scales of rotted fish.
And in this room, the broken body of a deer, twisted upon itself, legs over head and around antlers, and some of the rest wrenched free for feed.
And in this room, a heavy line arced in the ash, acrid urine, another marker that the bear had raced ahead, and in the next room a runny shit, fresh from her body, and how I shivered to see it, to smell it stinking still.
And in this room, somehow a baby rabbit, alive, shaking in its fur. It had perhaps come into the deep house during the firestorm above, and now it was near death, with no mother to care for it and no food to find. I was hungry too, and just as lonely, and as I picked up the trembling bunny, I wondered if I had it in me to end early one of this world’s last things, so that I might go on a little longer.
I wondered, and as I wondered I stroked away the rabbit’s shivers, and then I wondered no more.
And in the next deepest room, only ash.
And in the room after that, only more of the same.
And then ash in the next room and in the next room and in the next, all rooms filled with ash and smoke-marred stones still radiating heat or else steaming with water falling through cracked ceilings, through ruptured floors, and throughout that descent the fingerling kept silent his counsel, spent his energies tormenting my body instead of my mind, seizing new stations as I slept in slanted doorways and damp hallways. Then visions of battle all night. Then one morning waking to find my right leg paralyzed straight, the muscles needed to flex it away from its numb position unresponsive even as I felt some ineffective ghost kicking, some shade of the right movement. As I kneaded the muscles and cursed my stubborn son, I felt the silent smirk of his faceless form move, and I stopped my massaging to punch his shapes, not caring that I would only bruise the surface of my stomach and thighs, never harming his holdings beneath.
Let my leg go or do not, I said. I will go on no matter what you do, no matter how it might hurt.
The fingerling did not respond, only let me struggle, believing he could convince me to abandon my last charge, the foundling’s body. But I would not and said as much: If I could not have carried the foundling, then I would have dragged him in his sheets, would have crawled the burned wreckage to search out enough wood to make a sledge on which to haul him down the stairs. I sat on the ground, driving my thumbs through my thick trousers, the spotted skin beneath, rubbing the prickling pain from my muscles, and as I fought nerve by nerve against the fingerling he bragged again about how he would one day take control, and that once he did my mind would be reduced to his former role, a prisoner pushed down, a belly-holed secret, wished forgotten. He would take my body and with it he would live his own life, in the house or on the dirt, among the trees of the woods or under the waters of the lake.
I had been given so many new bodies, he said, and one day he planned to rule them all.
MEMORY AS SADNESS DISCARDED, DENIED: To pretend to be unaffected by the almost-emptied rooms of the deep house. To pretend to have some other reasons to open again every door, scour every chamber, even after I knew what I would find, and so to lie to the fingerling, to claim I was looking for my wife, even though we both knew she was not there.
To claim to be hunting for the bear, even though as always she would find us, and not the other way around.
To be overcome at the tenth floor, then nearly emptied of reaction by the twentieth, and still to have a hundred more floors to walk, staircases to climb.
To eat what I could find, the cinders of the feast the foundling had claimed were always there, that I had not remembered, that I had believed poisoned, trapped as I would have trapped them.
To drink water fallen clean from the sky, now mixed black with what was once us, what were once the memories of my wife.
To again rub ashes into my face until my pores and ducts choked shut with my wife, so that I could not cry, so that my expressions were blanked by her absence.
And then in that state to reach the landing where my last descent had ended, that terminus jutted out from the last hall into the darkness surrounding, spread over the black that lay below, swirling around the spiral of the great stairs.
After the long walk trapped in the burned house there was some relief to again taste the better air of that wider chamber, but also some fear, because my failing eyesight could not penetrate the dark below or around, nor could my ringing ears locate the source of the cool wind that blew across the unbounded expanse. Rather than proceed immediately across the landing and onto the stairs, I stayed close to the last door of the deep house, lingered there until I believed myself ready. After some hesitation I approached the great stairs, and there I reached out my good foot to place it upon the first stair—and then I stumbled unbalanced upon my bad foot, nearly falling when I
would not take that step—and how the fingerling laughed then, at my flaws again revealed.
The temperature dropped until I shivered constantly in my last clothes and in my tired bones, and then the fingerling lapsed quiet, his voice chilled, and so for a time he tormented me no more, let off his bragging, and rightly so: He had won much of what he’d stood to win, and what good had it done him? His rival the foundling was dead, and we were on our way to find his mother. And if she was dead too? Then even that might be no bother, as she was not the end of mothering, not even in this long-wearied world. Somewhere above or below there was the bear, hunting her way through the house, a danger, yes, but also another mother to whom the fingerling could be given, offered in replacement for her silenced cub—but then the bear was also more than one element, bear and mother, a combination we rarely spoke of, barely mentioned.
From below darkness leaked, and black too, had since before we first arrived at the landing, and soon the cold and the exhaustion of my long descent overwhelmed me, until there was no choice but to give more control to the fingerling, so that while I rested he might watch the stairs above. I instructed him to wake me at the first sign, and then I asked for his worthless promise, begged him to make no bargains of his own, for it was his mother he wanted, not this other who wanted his mother dead.
Before I slept I begged him to be no one else’s foundling, and in the last moment of wakefulness I knew my mistake, how I had said too much: He had never before considered that there was more than one way to find a mother, more than one route to becoming a son, and now he said, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CUB AND A BOY?
He said, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE TO ME?
BUT LATER THE FINGERLING DID cry me from my sleep, as he spoke loud in all his many voices, each new tongue battering me up into wakefulness. How long had I slept? Long enough that my first movements caused my beard to spill nested spiders down my chest, their pale bodies scurrying across and into my clothes, and as I shook them from those folds, my sight cataracted, firing white points across the dark of the landing, and from too close the bear roared so that I hurried to push muscles against my rusty joints, made them to lift me from the ground, to point my beggar’s bones in the direction of her approach. At my feet lay her shrouded son, smaller now, the sad shell of a departed ghost, and there would be no hiding his shape. I wet my throat with swallowed spit, and when the bear appeared—that bony armor, gathered across that muscled hump; that yellow mouth, set slavering in that wide-wedged head—even before she was fully emerged from the stairwell I began to speak, as fast and loud as I could.
With dream still slipping from my syllables, I said to the bear, My wife’s songs have torn down the sky, have dug this deep house, have thrown moons up and dragged stars down, and I know you know these powers and of others besides.
I said, I know that you were once mighty too, but my wife has another song, one with the power to do what your music cannot. With this song my wife can restore your child, can find and bind the ghost of your cub to this boy, and then make him again into the bear he was always meant by you to be.
This is why I seek her, why I have waited here for you, where you might help me reach her.
I said, I know you killed your cub, shaped into our shape, and I know your misery must be absolute—absolute as your anger has always been.
I said, I do not know why you did it, but with my wife’s help it can be undone.
I said these things, and then the bear roared, the force staggering me, and as she started her approach I spoke faster, finished what few words I had left to say—and I am sorry to say I said them—that when the bear’s son was made whole again, then I would end my wife, as long ago I promised the bear I would.
I said, In return, you will make me be a bear too. You will breathe fur upon my skin and upon the skin of your son.
I said, We will be a family of bears, and you shall be its head forever.
But bears take no mates, marry no one. What children they have, they belong to mothers alone, and how little mother there was left to receive my words, the words I hoped were like those she wanted to hear, if there even were such words: Her bones remained long and thicker than ever, but as I had seen from the lake there was no fur atop her face or shoulders or flanks, barely even flesh where fur should have been. If her claws had pulled from her paws then it hardly mattered, because covering her everywhere were sharp points, spurs of bone come to replace those previous implements. Her eyes spun wide in the hollows of their orbits, and she seemed able to fix me only with one pupil or the other, never both at once, and while her wounded gaze shook me, it did not make me move my own hurt face away. Despite the rank rot of her speech, I stood fast before her, and as I watched the muscles move atop her murdering face I put between us another truth so that I might armor my lie within it: Before the falling of the moon, I said, I had been dead upon the floor of our house, heart stopped, and the foundling had sung me back into life—and this the bear did not want to hear.
The bear covered the last distance between us in a bound, knocking me to the stones with the slap of an uncurling fist. The foundling’s shrouded body was beneath her and between us, and she stepped carefully around it even as she pressed the weight of her paw upon my chest. My ribs strained, and for a time my breath fled, and with wheezing growls she berated my deceptions, my dishonest intentions in all the moments from the first we shared upon the dirt until this one. Still I persisted in my story, kept to what had happened: I had been dead, and the foundling had given me life.
In the woods I had buried so many animals, and while I had seen what later fled up and out of their graves, I knew that what the bear had to offer was not new life but only some portion of the old come back, a portion subtracted from a better whole and never to be fixed again. And so I convinced her that the founding had learned this trick from his other mother, my wife, that there was a song that brought the human dead back to life, and only my wife and her foundling knew it. Not me, with my tone-deaf ears, and not the bear, with her language of barks and growls. Only working together would we see my wife again, and only together would we each get what we wanted.
The bear roared, and in her roar she said, All our pacts have been nullified, revoked.
After my cub is restored to me, then I will kill the thief for what she took from me, for what that taking cost.
After your wife is dead, then I will take my new cub and return to the woods, the woods that will grow where my woods once grew.
You I do not want. You will leave this place forever, returning to the country across the lake, and if ever I smell your scent again I will separate it from your skin with every tooth and claw I have left.
She said, I did not mean to kill my cub, but in the darkness and the fire his shadow grew long, and when I saw its length spread across the wall of my cave then I mistook him for you, clothed as he was in your stinking clothes.
THE BEAR LOWERED HERSELF BEFORE me, all her remainder shaking with the containment of her rage. I struggled aboard her broad shoulders with the foundling clutched to my chest, and the bear’s armor cut my thighs as I tried to find some right place to saddle myself, and so each movement made a wound, and each wound itched and burned, and the burning bled the last sleep out of my legs, the body above.
The fingerling argued against my revealed plan, claiming that what had been impossible was made easy: Now there was a gap in the bear’s armor between its head and its torso, a space where two plates of bone ground with each step, where my blade might slip between to spill her out, no longer having to saw through the layers of hair and skin and fat that once blocked entrance to the bear’s jugular, its carotid.
The fingerling said, THIS TRUCE I CANNOT ALLOW, but by then it was too late, and the bear started down the great stairs with switch-backed bounds, plummeting from left to right of the fast-dropping spiral, and with my free hand I clutched at the sharp points of her shoulder blades, cried out as each leap cut me deeper, sawed at what little fle
sh was left.
The bear moved fast, and yet we seemed barely to advance, there being so many stairs above us, so many still dropping below. She leaped down the high and uneven steps, and while often she landed sure of foot she also sometimes stumbled, sliding sideways across the precarious stone of the steps. More than once I was nearly thrown from her shoulders, and each near fall left me shaken, clutching tight to all I needed to hold. At this depth, the walls around the stairs faded, and then sight and scent began to do the same, and even without the whole of those senses I perceived or believed I did that we were in a wide cave or carved chamber, farther bounded than any I’d experienced before. If there was sound at the edges of that space, then it did not reach us upon the stairs, and nothing flapped or flew or dripped through the yawning dark. Emptied of activity, the air thinned, and as we descended farther there was for a time only the bear’s footsteps, her harsh breathing, and also my own constant wheezing, some effect of age or injury I could no longer suppress, each of our base noises flatter without the possibility for resonance or echo.