by Matt Bell
Only one place, a chamber clenched.
The squid had reshaped my body but it was not all a part of me, and so I too was a passenger or else a pilot, as the fingerling had been between my bones, and while the squid first jetted toward the center of the lake, away from the bear, it soon began the long arc back, by my command. The bear was still bellowing through the shallows when we struck her the first time, raking a hooked tentacle from out the water and across her bony trap-scarred snout, and she howled in pain or frustration. The squid pressed, circled, pressed again, put our hooked and barbed tentacles to their use, all our arms with more reach than even the bear’s own long grasp, and also with a beak the equal of her mouth, if not its better, the bear’s now loose of tooth and weak of jaw, but still the squid did not bring our full fight upon her, not while she was able to stand in the low water. Instead we pulled and tore her flesh, her facing flank, and with quick blows we lured her on, and when she began to falter and to wail only then did we taunt her failing courage with the shrouded shape of her once-cub, the foundling pushed out into the lake, floating bloated upon the surface and waiting to be claimed.
How the bear bellowed then! Grayest water shook from off her roaring head, her bone mantle glistening in the false light sparkling all the surface of my wife’s new-sung world, and then the bear charged into the deeper water, fast again, fast as she had moved between the trees of her own woods. When her feet left the lake floor, without hesitation she swam on, her armored legs pumping beneath the water, churning her path as she struggled to keep her snout above the surface, pointed at the floating shroud still out of reach. The water was deep and cold, deeper and colder than its small circumference suggested, and into those depths the squid dove, and from those depths we rose again to strike at the bear, to rake our hooks across her belly, the bones of her armor, and despite those gouges we could do no real harm, would never except in that space the fingerling had shown me, that bone-bare stretch of her throat that we could not yet reach. As the bear swam, the squid frustrated her with our speed, with our ability to attack then quickly retreat, moving from her floundering shape to the floating body of the foundling, and there was no danger to me then, so deep inside: From this new station I was never once afraid of the bear, as I had been on the dirt and in the woods and in the house. All my years upon the dirt the bear had seemed to master me, and now I would master her.
As we fought, the fingerling moved within the corridors of the squid shape, assuming new posts and positions, and as the squid swam around the bear so also the fingerling was set in motion inside that movement, testing every space. The fingerling approached an organ much like the stomach he had claimed, and when he was wormed deep inside that clenched and puckered sac, then at my command the squid charged up through the depths toward the struggling bear, and there I said goodbye, goodbye to son and ghost, goodbye to bear and other-mother, other-wife who was never mine, and if they did not wholly deserve this end they got, at least they were ended, and what mercy I believed that was: To steer the squid to swim before the bear, leading her on, then to turn our body back. To feel the squid release into the water the contents of our ink sac like a fist opening, the unfolding of a hand holding some smoky darkness, holding blackness, my blackness, yes, all that ghost I had named the fingerling when it deserved no other name, and now that son, caught there in that organ, and now that son expelled at last, swimming out into obfuscation, into a cloud of camouflage, into a cloud of grief through which the squid swam, my past floating outside our body, and still I felt nothing, still I saw with the dispassionate yellow gaze of the squid—or else how could I have done what I did—and the voice and the voices of my only son surrounded us, made a cloud that was not just ink, and in it the squid saw everything and the bear saw nothing, and the water churned with the stuff of our ink and the unmakings of the fingerling, torn and threaded by the sharp slimness of that expelling orifice, and as this animated ink he floated in streaks and flumes around the bear, whose mouth filled when she growled to smell him, the clotted stink of something rotten unbirthed, gestated too long.
The squid was a hunter and a trapper too, and I was the squid, and the squid was me, and we shot through the ink toward the bear, searching for that thin breadth of bone-spaced chance, and as we jetted through that horror I heard the fingerling’s voice call out to me, call out in many voices for me to save him, to take him back in, begging as only a child can beg. Despite his treacheries he was sometimes somehow still a baby boy, and had I been a man his drowning might have undone the taut strings with which I had shut my heart.
As a squid?
As a squid I saw only a food we would not eat, flesh of my flesh, poison if I made the same mistake again. His blackness streamed around us, but all the squid cared was how it hid our long shape, masked our sharp scent. We swam the wet length of our clouded boy, and when the squid reached the bear we sought again to strike her where she needed to be struck, and against us and against the fingerling the bear struggled to surface, her mouth and eyes and ears filling with the bodies of my son, with the minnowed shapes of him. And what shapes they were! Not just ink and boy but already hunger and hatred clumping, solidifying, becoming new shapes, new forms of ancient and angry swimmers, each frustrating the bear, then tearing at her eyes, then dismantling the last solid sockets of her jaw, then eating her tongue from out her mouth.
Soon the bear was blind and belligerent, confused so that she did not know up or down, and the squid circled her flailing once, twice, amid the ink. I wanted to speak to her, to reach out and say some parting words—to say sorry, sorry again—but the squid did not have the same brain as a man, nor the same vocal cords, and without the fingerling I could not have translated her replies, and anyway what right words were there to say.
The squid dragged our hooks across the bear’s stomach, this time breaking her weakened bones across new perforations, leaving furrows for the black ghosts of the fingerling to crack wider, and when that succeeded we laid down more cuts, across the hump of the shoulders and both halves of the hips, across the plates of the bear’s back and head. I needed the squid to strike the throat, craved that hit, but could not help my marveling at our thoroughness, the glory of this hunter’s shape, so different from my trapper’s form upon the land, for the squid was an exquisite killing machine and within it I an exquisite killer. The ghosts of the fingerling hungered, desperate outside my strong-shelled body, and with no other source in the empty lake they redoubled their attack on the bear, tore strings of marrow from out her bones, and with them they grew quickly larger, shaped more like fish, then more like eels. Black scaled and dark slimed, they wiggled in and out of the bear’s armor, and when they slipped away it was with gulping throats, bloated stomachs.
All around me was the squid, and all around the squid was the black of our ink, my own personal black, a trap carried for so long so that it might snare the bear, so that within it the squid might drag her down, and I wondered then: Did she remember the first squid, in the lake above, how he too showed her the bottom of his lake? How there he promised her its future?
Did she realize that future had happened, and that here at last it was at its end, the last of the present, the beginning of the forever-past, and the bear was no human woman anymore, no bear-mother either, but some other thing, adversary made killer made legend: And although I might have felt remorse at the killing of a woman, how could I feel the same for a myth, this unlovable story?
We sensed only the slightest resistance as our hooks swung through the slice of space between the bear’s head and neck, just a small snag and then another as those sharp edges dragged through the windpipe and the jugular and the carotid, and then the squid pushed forward, shoved our head into that space as another squid had entered into my chest, and with our beak we tore the bear until a loud rising of air filled the water, then pink foam, then black, and then and then and then, and then to be the squid and to have the squid be me, to together be a hunter who had hunted: to
swim unflinched as the bear jerked inside our embrace, then to feel her loosen, limp out. And after we finished tearing loose her throat, then we released her bulk to swim arcing away, so that her unblubbered bones might slowly sink, burdened by the heavy weight of the many fingerlings, their shapes come hungry to feed.
WHAT ACCOMPANIED US THEN BUT a child’s cacophony, the fingerling’s voice not one speech but a thousand, a thousand thousands, all together the sound of a break, and of a fracture. I had given him an innumerable number of pains, and he had returned to me the same, and now all of those hurts would own the depths of this lake, would feed on the bear for as long as it took to take her inside their many mouths, and so at least he would possess the mother he had wished to possess, as much as I had possessed him.
As I swam, I wanted to call out to the fingerlings, all the many schools fluttering around. I wanted to speak to them, but not to give them commands, not fatherly warnings or threats or pleas or admonishments. At last I wished to offer only names, all the names we had meant to give our many children. I wanted to give the fingerling what he had long ago asked me for, but I had no human mouth and so could offer nothing more, and anyway it was nothing he gave me back, neither satisfaction nor forgiveness nor a surface on which to attach my sadness, my relief. Whatever forms the fingerling next took on, none would be my son, and not my wife’s either. The fingerling had gone too far already, even though it had been only minutes since our separation, the annulment of our sharing the space within my shape. Now he had taken his leave of me and I of him, and whoever next heard his many voices would not be me.
The squid gathered the foundling in our two largest tentacles, our strongest arms, then in powerful spurts jetted us back to the shallows, where I could again stand, become the husband, and in my arms the foundling became the son, the only son. As I came out of the water I came out of the squid too, and as a man I smelled the foundling’s death differently, took in the decay that had rushed forward from the restarting of the clock. Upon the shore was my satchel, its strap cut from my back by the bear’s last blow, and as I gathered it up I smelled it too, the two bearskins within it. All felt foul and also fouled, and I could feel the wrongness of their long carryings, my keeping them from the grave or the pyre or the lake. I had brought these as offerings for my wife, but what good thing was I bringing?
A corpse and the coverings of corpses.
To the very end, I had always been the weakest one, and yet it was only I who had gone on and on. Among all the unfair worlds in which we lived, all the other elements had fallen and failed, and still there was me, still there was husband. Now here I was, arrived, alone—and always it was in my loneliness that I had best survived—and in the next moment the front door of the house opened, and from that portal out stepped my wife, but not the wife I had known.
I EMERGED FROM THE LAKE to see her standing in the doorway of her house, the house that was only hers, so much like the one that had been ours. My wife lingered half in and half out, her hands clenched against the doorframe, that bordered threshold between the dirt and the house, and as I jerked my body up the path I saw even at that distance how the muscles of her face made her mouth to move, but also how no words escaped. With the foundling in my arms, I hurried as best my ruin would allow, and as I walked I rang out her name, voiced it forth into the air, made the shape of its three letters, vowel and consonant and vowel again.
I called her as she was called, but she gave no sign that she heard, or that if she heard she recognized the name, and when I called again her only response was alarm, perhaps fear: at my presence, at the sight of the foundling and me together, pathed from the lake to the house. As I got closer, I saw she had been changed as I had been changed, not just by age but by some other circumstances too: Where once she had looked the part of a woman I had known, now she was fevered into some new person, a scorched wife. As the foundling had described, there had been a fire lit within her, and while it had not consumed her flesh it had filled her with its heat, so that she could wear no clothes, so that her pale skin was darkened like burned and crackled paper, and her hair was become white, robbed of its pigment. And no matter what I said, still my wife did not speak, still she did not say a single word.
This last memory of my long search, memory as failure, as failure, a faltering: To scream her name again. To kneel before her, and then to lay prostrate at her smoking feet. To thrust wildly at the air with her single syllable, that balanced word, that unanswered name savaged with disuse. To kneel, holding the foundling, rocking his shrouded shape, unable to make my wife accept what had been brought.
To want already for that moment to be over but to fear that afterward there would be only worse moments to come. And so to still be the husband and to be the father but to have neither role acknowledged and in this absence of expected station to want for time to stop again, but to know that clockless hours were gone for good.
UPON THE PORCH, ALL OF me dripped, gushed, my naked wounds made known before my transformed wife: The trap-crushed ankle throbbed again with the wrongness of its healing, and without the fingerling’s support the bear-wrenched shoulder hung crooked from its socket, and while those old wounds cried first it was the most recent that spoke loudest. The blood from that wound streaked, streamed around the almost-aligned knuckles of my spine, over my gooseflesh and old scars. Damaged breath wheezed from between the small remnants of my teeth, and as I sucked more air to say her name again I dizzied, my vision all sparks.
I did not know what other words to say, and so I said her name, said it until I was emptied of its sound, and then when I was hoarse and breathless I breathed it back in, and all I wanted in return was for her to speak some part of what I had come so far to hear: my own name returned, perhaps, or else an accusation, best followed by the terms of my eventual forgiveness.
Only after I quieted myself did she crouch down beside me, sinking her knees into the pool of my leaking.
She took my face between her hot hands, and then holding my cheeks—and then the smell of singed beard, of steamed tears—and then holding me, she said, Who are you?
She said, Where have you come from?
She pointed to the foundling, shrouded in dirty white, and as her accusing gaze lingered she said, Who is this, and why have you brought him?
And then, as if she had not already broken me, she turned and stepped back across the threshold, shutting the door.
I waited upon the porch, listened at the wood of the house, strained for the clatter and clack of objects within. After some moments had passed the door reopened, and this woman who had been my wife stepped back out onto the porch, reached out a hand. I took her fingers, took too much of them, and weaved them into mine, and though her heat hurt me I did not recoil, had waited too long to pull away in pain. At her request, I left the foundling momentarily upon the slats of the porch, then followed her out onto the dirt, where each step of hers burned away even what few patches of grass there were, and then in a circle of dirt she stopped and turned back, surveyed my wounds, the many leaks and lacerations upon my body.
With her index finger, she counted each, and as she touched them her heat sizzled and then cauterized the wounds shut, until eventually all that was left would stay there, heavy within me.
Amid the pain and stink, again her voice, again saying, Who are you?
Saying, Where have you come from?
Saying, Whose shroud is that upon my porch?
I am your husband, I said.
You left me, I said. Because you had a son, and after you left I looked for you, and later you sent him to look for me—
I said, I am your husband, and you were my wife, and together we had a son.
I said, I promise you, you are my wife still.
She listened to me speak, and then she shook her head.
No, she said. Always I have been here, and always I have been alone. Almost always it has only been me, and no other.
We were naked together upon the dirt,
but still we were not as one. When I tried to argue my case, she stopped me, put a finger to my mouth, burned a streak across my already-chapped lips.
Later, she said. I am so tired.
It is time for me to rest, she said, and then she dropped my hand and turned back for the house.
Where will I go? I asked. Where will I go next?
Then come, she said, and it was as easy as that, and then she said, It does not matter to me.
Without waiting she passed through the door and into the house, and then I lifted the foundling and carried him across that threshold, and also the satchel containing the two furs, the one real and one made. While my wife disappeared farther into the house, I returned to the entranceway to shut the door against the day-like light, the almost lack of wind outside. At last husband and wife and child were again gathered under one roof, and that alone was better than what other states had for so long persisted, on all the other floors of this world.
THE LAYOUT OF THE LAST house was the same as the one we’d shared, and in the front room, I saw a wood-framed sofa like one I had built and that she had upholstered with song, set again before a fireplace clean and piled beside with kindling. On the walls hung framed photographs of our wedding day, pictures that in our first house had been destroyed by the bear, and while my wife had forgotten everything, here everything was. With the spotted tips of my fingers I touched the image of my wife’s face, and also mine, and that couple was long gone now, and it was no wonder she did not recognize us, and yet still there was something there, in or around the eyes, perhaps, or in the set of a mouth, the shape of a nose or neckline: a man and a woman just married, terrible in the potencies of their youth, their early love.