In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

by Matt Bell

  As she navigated the great stairs, the bear’s growls of recognition turned again to speech and then to story, her heavy voice a tiring whisper, and through the fingerling she was translated and amplified, as she offered some last words into the grayer air where words could still be spoken.

  The bear said, I do not know what you and your wife fled, but in my old country I no longer had any husband of my own. We had married and he had built a house, and then that house had burned, and then he had died in the fire, taking everything of him with him, and I had not even a child to remind me of him, only some wide scars of the burns I had suffered when I failed to save him, marks of what for some time I wished had consumed me too.

  She said, Afterward I came to the dirt, but I did not build a house, did not know how, did not even want a house again, when houses had for me proved so temporary.

  She said, From the first I lived in the cave, and in the day I walked the woods, picked its berries and dug its tubers, made for myself some simple life in which I owned nothing, in which I wanted for no other.

  But there was already another here, she said, and he watched me, and later I felt him watching.

  When I walked across the dirt, and then into the lake to wash myself and to swim in the cold gray water, there I found him waiting, and after he hushed away my reluctance he showed me many sights, both the surface of things and also what lay deeper beneath.

  She said, It was he who showed me the black and also how to dive below it, first with him and then on my own.

  It was there in the black that I changed for the first time, that I became some other shape than grieving woman, than widow bereft.

  She said, I was not always a bear, but I was not before that just one other thing.

  Neither was he, she said. He was both whale and squid, and once a man, once many men, perhaps.

  He was so old when I met him, she said, but even in his old awfulness he could still be gentle, and in the lake-black our shapes did not matter, and so we were as one for a time, and the next time we separated I was two, one floating inside the other, and he was still his same multitude, his legion of possibility, a thousand shapes all wanting only to be made more, to be taken out of the lake and onto the dirt, then back into the other world, the country where what he was might spread.

  All I wanted was one child, one boy to love, to take the place of the man I had lost, and when I saw I could not have just that then I hid his child inside me and refused all others, and with what strength he had taught me I kept him away until I could escape the black, the water above. Against his anger, I left the lake and went back to the woods, where I was sure he could not follow, and in my cave, among the dark shadows gathered between the world’s broad bones, there I saw that it was our children who gave us shape, as much as we shaped them, and for my coming child I became a bear, meant us both be bears forever, so that what human miseries I had known might never know him.

  The light from the fires above had long faded, and the broken shafts of light falling from the surface could not reach this deep either, and now there was only darkness. Or rather, not darkness but the whole of that element that I had never experienced upon the dirt, with its moon and its moons, and only partially under the lake. Now here was the fullness of the black, the truth of that element undiluted and worse than I’d imagined. The black was thick in places and hot too, and also it was cold and thin at other depths, and whatever it was it was always there. Other senses failed too, so that sometimes I could not feel my skin, goosefleshed with chill or else sweating and bloody, nor could I any longer hear through the weight of the black’s silence. My tongue went numb, and the inside of my nose felt so full of silt that I could not clear it, and still the bear moved downward, still she bellowed soundlessly, as I felt her lungs fill and empty below my legs, when I felt anything at all.

  Downward and downward she took us, navigating by something I could not sense, perhaps the smell of her cub’s last disguised passing, perhaps the scent of the woman who stole him away. I could not even see my fingers in front of my face, but I felt or else imagined that the way occasionally flattened, straightened, that we arrived at wide landings, at whole floors riddled with black passageways leading away from the stairs toward other black chambers. It was only there among those widest floors that the bear became confused, almost lost. There she had to put her bloody nose to the ground and sniff for her trail, and I wondered how much better even her weakened senses were that she could smell so much through the black when I could not, and if what confused her was not losing the trail but rather having it fracture, spreading in too many directions, for even though those passageways were as yet unlit they were not empty, and if they were like those above, then they might have held me, might have held my wife, and also the bear and the squid and the fingerling and the foundling, and I saw in the bear’s nosing of the stone floors that whereas the deep house had been mostly our past this deeper house could have been our future—but then that future was dark and cold, an emptied gulf where there was nothing to hear but silence, nothing to see but absence, nothing to own but our lack.

  And then for some long span there was no light above and no light below, and no other senses either, and for a time no thought, only the black, the black and also us turning inward upon the stairs inside it, except for when I thought I saw what was once a star fall off in the distance, tunneling white-blazing through the senseless void, but surely I imagined the sights its light showed me, nightmares indescribable; and then even that blackest black, it could not go on forever, and although I did not mark when we began to emerge any more than I was sure when we had become fully immersed, there next came a returning of sensation, and with each step we descended, the black receded or was at last pushed back.

  ONCE AGAIN I RECOGNIZED A graying of the air, some shelves of rocks jutting into sight, some cave walls closing in, and soon all these surfaces resolved into sight, wet with the moisture trapped under the earth, and that water dripped onto my face and my hands, waking my body from its stasis, the senseless sleep of our descent. Now there was no more hibernation, only a thousand small and vulgar pains: My thighs ached with the movement of the bear’s bony plates, and my teeth shook in their sockets as I tested them with my tongue, that stiff organ suddenly dry and aching. I lifted my face, opened my mouth to let the moisture drip into me, each drop cooling some tiny fraction of the sore heat in my throat, and with light returning it was easier to see how blind I was going, had gone, how my one bad eye had become two. Soon I would see nothing at all, and I began to worry that I would arrive too late, that in her chambers I would not be able to look upon the wife I had come so far to find.

  We were again upon a structure recognizable as a staircase, with a ceiling and a floor and walls close and closing in. Now there was the darker black above us and a lighter light below, and I felt my heart race forward, accelerating to let a rare bit of excited blood pass through its clogged valves and pumps, that fist of red muscle shaking anew, thudding my bones, setting their chorus to vibrating, and from inside that feeling I said, Hurry, I said, Hurry to the bottom now—

  At the sound of my voice, the bear slipped, staggered, the front of her body lower than the back and now sliding sideways, and as I tightened my grip on the pommel of a protruding shoulder blade, the bone shattered, became a handful of dust. The bear cried out, bent the wide wedge of her head back upon me, and she was near blind then too, one eye clouded, the long-drooping other caked with layered rheum and salt, grinding as it turned in its orbit. She opened her mouth to make some warning, but there was so little growl left in her, too little to waste. Snot dripped from her caved nostrils, and the remains of her lips drooled white clumps of thirsty spit, and the cords in her neck jumped between her bones, so that I could see her stretched muscles working her toothless face, that countenance no less fearsome for its lack of skin, of underlying blood with which to make its hate known, and to that face I said, I am sorry.

  I am sorry, I said.
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br />   I said, I am sorry, but still I must ask you to hurry.

  How the bear hated me then, as I hated her: She stiffened beneath her bones, cast that hate’s heat through what shell she had left, and then again we were descending, and as our pace resumed and then exceeded its prior state, the fingerling pulsed in my belly, grew bold against my touch. How much of my territory he had acquired, and now he returned to me only what I did not want, some other sensations I had set aside: My liver throbbed with him, as did my lungs, my gall bladder, the bone in my thigh. In my stomach was the worst pain, the first of it ever and now still there, fibrous and hard. I poked at that first tumor with my fingers, pushed him floating through the nausea, then gasped at the new pains in my bowels and in my balls, at the bloating that followed the fingerling’s bulging against the walls of my organs, the inside of my abraded flesh, my hollowed skin.

  The bear’s body tensed beneath her armor, bristled the plates of bones around her head to quivering, and though the fingerling and I joined in her agitation still I did not see what the bear saw.

  The memory of our arrival at the foot of the world, at the bottom of everything: To reach the ending of the staircase to find a wall and in that wall a door, inset into the stone.

  To climb off the bear, holding the shrouded foundling against one shoulder so that my other hand might be free.

  To stand back as the bear threw herself upon the door, knocking her claw-bones against its locked strength.

  To let her roar herself empty, then to unfasten the stained join of my shirt, pull free my secret: the key to our house, the key that had forever fit all the doors of my wife’s deep house, whenever I’d found them locked against me.

  Then to put my palm against the cold stone of the door.

  Then to push it wide and also to step through.

  Then at last to understand: It was not a chamber my wife had built at the bottom of the great stairs but a house.

  A house, and also a dirt, and also a lake, and also a woods.

  5

  ADIRT, A WOODS, A LAKE, and all too close together, a miniature landscape surrounding a right-sized house: This was our land as we had first come to it, the place we had arrived newly married, childless but expectant. I had forgotten how bright those days had been, how sweet the air had smelled, but here those memories came rushing back, and even the dirt itself was moist and fragrant, readied for seed. But if the dirt had been made mostly right, still it seemed as if it was subordinate to the house, that shape rebuilt exactly as I remembered, and it seemed that instead of raising the house’s structure upon some preexisting plot, my wife had instead somehow started with its rooms, spinning them out of the black before spilling the lake and the woods and the dirt from within—and even at a glance it seemed obvious she had not finished. Despite the curve of sky above there was hanging upon it no sun and no stars and no moon, and so even the greenness of the trees and the blueness of the lake could not hide that we were at the bottom of a cave, a dome carved from beneath a blanket of blackness. I did not forget then, fought against being fooled, for in that moment I wanted all my senses, knew it was important that I not succumb to this illusion, and so I observed only what original elements I recognized, and also some of their smaller parts: In the window of my wife’s house there flickered the faintness of a gas-lamp, one nearly exhausted of fuel, and I thrilled at the sight, for I believed it meant she lived, that someone still lived inside her house.

  The bear bellowed, shoved past me as I stepped farther out onto the dirt, her movements hurried with anger. I let her pass, and with the foundling left behind me in the passageway my hands were freed to drag back my torn and filthy sleeve to reveal my long-stalled watch, that round face, that hovered hand no longer walking its circles. With my other sleeve I scrubbed at its clouded surface, then abandoned my cleaning to wind its stem, and as I did when I tested our family with the fish and the rabbits, I invented my own rules to cause what would happen next—and my new rule said it did not matter what time it was, only that there was again time—and so I wound and I wound, and then I held that mechanism until the bear was halfway between the door and the house, and then with a flinch I let its wheel unwind.

  What gasps racked my body then, and also the body of the bear! All that had been slowed now accelerated upon us, old inertias shuddering us forward until the bear’s legs ran too fast, tripping each other, her bone knees smacking against swelled feet. She stumbled and fell forward into the dirt, her head tucked for protection from the crash, her momentum threatening to flip her bulk, but as her shoulders hit the dirt they caught, carved a furrow into the ground, a trench diagonal across the path to the house.

  By the time I had gathered the shrouded foundling into my arms and stepped back through the door onto the last dirt, by then the bear was already up again, climbed free and turned back, her bone-limited expression impossible to read at that distance. And then fragments of that bone flying loose as she shook her body, freeing the dirt from her shell. And then snot and spit and bloody worse roping out from her mouth, out of other holes, wounds, opening sores. And then with each step, more dissolution, more disintegration of what shape she had held for so long—and as her body shattered all around her, perhaps she did understand what had happened, or perhaps not.

  It did not matter, not then, not to me.

  The bear hesitated for some moment, rolled her gaze between me and the still-unopened house, as I stepped forward with my wife’s son held again against me, close in my care. She righted her stance, then proceeded to the house, where with her new paws she battered it as she had thrashed the logs of our first home. Here it seemed the bear held no power over the seams of the house, nor the strength of its walls, and her blows had no effect besides their terrible booming racket, echoed throughout the large chamber. The bear roared, her voice senseless with frustration, even if diminished, and I saw how in her anger she became more an animal, dumber and more dangerous, and while she worked her toothless jaws against my wife’s unencroachable doorjamb I went another way.

  Let the bear try for the house, I said. She will gain no entry, and follow us instead.

  How sure I meant to speak, but how worried I might have sounded, and more so when I felt the fingerling’s smirking shapes, all moving, all growing faster, radiating from my stomach and everywhere else: He was in my throat and in my spleen, in my liver and in the cork of my bones and flush throughout my head, so that my skull felt too full, so that all my thoughts were pressed in upon. I had not long left before he had the whole of me, but with that time I believed I could at least reach the lake. With every step its water pulled me more, its shimmer tugging at the shape that awaited within or else just outside my shell, an aura ready to be made flesh.

  To have my breath stolen away. To stumble, one knee kissing the dirt. To stand and to struggle forward, and then to feel my voice lifted out of my throat and into the air, loud as my dry mouth allowed, and with it came the words the fingerling had waited so long to say, loud betrayals flung back toward the bear, her thrashing at the sound structure of the house:

  SAVE ME, the fingerling said. SAVE ME INSTEAD OF YOUR CUB, AND I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU.

  I WILL NEVER DIE, he said. I WILL NEVER AGE.

  I AM A CHILD WHO IS A GHOST WHO IS A CANCER AND I AM FOREVER.

  I CAN KEEP YOU STRONG, AS I HAVE KEPT THIS WEAKEST MAN, AND TOGETHER WE WILL HAVE ALL THE LAKE AND DIRT AND WOODS WE WANT.

  The fingerling said, KILL MY FATHER AND EAT HIS BODY, AND WITHIN HIM, YOU WILL FIND ME WAITING.

  The fingerling said, HURRY, FOR HE IS ALMOST INTO THE WATER, and then the bear cracked the air with her anger, turned inside the sound of her voice. She bounded across the dirt, in pursuit of my burdened limping, and while I could have ensured my escape by casting aside the foundling I was unwilling to create an impasse where I held the lake and the bear held the shore—and then in only a few steps I was at the water’s edge—and there the bear struck me just once, a terrible blow landed in haste,
at the shallow threshold of the water and the land, the dirt and the lake.

  THE BEAR’S FIST OF BONE struck me from shoulder to hip, through my back, scraped against skin and muscle and organ and rib, and by its force I was dropped into the water, the foundling still held tight against my chest, and as I fell I tucked him within my motion, curled his dead body in the curve of my still living one, and then in the shallows came the shift, the slide sideways into another shape so that I was no longer who I had been, or else I was still him and also something more, and then from behind me came the splashing of the bear following me out into the water, into the waves that spilled up to and then crested over her heavy head.

  My next transformation was not about a mouth that became a beak, was not merely arms and legs that became tentacles thickened with hooks and suckers. Even the eyes of squid were not pathed as the eyes of men, and so new-sighted mechanisms had to be made in this instant, a second long enough. I was adept now at making do with what time there was, and so here there was time enough for one last plan, the quick purposing of my new body, the filling of it with its task: to kill this bear, this mother I pitied but whom the rules of this world would not let me save; who had frustrated me for so long; who had tried to kill me and had killed the foundling instead; whom I too had hurt, but whose forgiveness I could not earn.

  And what was the fingerling’s role in this fight, and whose side would he take?

  Perhaps he had imagined he would be able to again frustrate me, but now it was I who frustrated him, with a body made strange, its hollows unfamiliar tunnels: If he lived part of his life in my spleen, where would he go now that I had no spleen? Where were my new lungs, my new gall bladder, my new arms and legs? For the fingerling, who had besieged my bones to bending, where was there to go when I had no bones?