Bears Discover Fire

by Terry Bisson

  “Thrombophlebitis,” said DeCandyle. “The blood clots when it pools in the veins for too long. But don’t worry; the C-T chamber diffusion fluid now contains a blood thinner.”

  We lay down together, side by side. My hand found the glove, which was between us. Was the solution getting old? There was a funny smell. Sorel’s hand found mine and our fingers met in their familiar lascivious fond embrace, except—

  She was missing a finger. Two.

  Stumps.

  My hand froze, wanting to pull away; the handbasket started gurgling and we were rolled forward, then stopped.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.” A part of me was scared; another part of me was amazed at how impatient a third part of me was to die.

  We were rolled forward again, feet first, into the cold, slightly acrid air of the chamber. A door closed behind my head. Before I had time to panic, Sorel’s fingers found mine and comforted them, opening them like petals, and there was the sting. My heart stopped, like a TV that has been turned off.

  Or on. For there came a kaleidoscope of colors, through which I arose, faster and faster. There was no floating, no looking back, no basking in the lattice of light; for no sooner had I seen—no, glimpsed—the familiar splendors of LAD space than they were gone and we were in that other darkness.

  The Other Side.

  It stretched around us endless and yet enclosing. The “sky” was low like a coffin lid. Sorel and I moved stiffly, drifting, no longer spirit but all flesh. I was dead awake. I was conscious of her buttocks, the flesh on her arms which was fluted somehow like toadstool skin; the cold insect smell as we circled the stone pillars that pinned the low sky down.

  We seemed to get no closer as we circled “The Pens” (as I was to call them in a painting): they spun slowly in the center of our immobility, like a system of stone stars. Again someone, some Other, waited inside. Under the lattice of light there was no sense of time’s passage, perhaps because the spirit (unlike the body) moved at time’s exact speed; but here, on the Other Side, time no longer buoyed us in its stream. There was no movement. Every forever was inside another forever, and the moments were no longer a stream but a pond: concentric circles that went nowhere.

  There were other differences. In LAD space I had known, even dead, that I was alive. Here I knew that I was dead. That even alive, I was dead: that I had always been dead. That this was the reality into which all else flowed, from which nothing came. That this was the end of things.

  My terror never diminished, nor did it grow: a still panic filled every cell of my body like uncirculating blood.

  Yet I was unmoved; I watched myself suffer as dispassionately as a boy watches a bug burn.

  Sorel was dead-white. She was somehow closer to the pens and when she reached out the stone was right there.

  She turned toward me and her face was blank, a gaze of bone. Mine back at her was the same; our nothingness was complete. We were at the standing stones and through them I could see a figure. He (it was a he) beckoned and Sorel passed through the stones, but I pulled back: then I, too, touched the stone (colder than cold) and I was with her again.

  We were inside the pens and now there were three of us, and it was as if there had always been. We were following Noroguchi (it was surely he) into a sort of dark water, which grew deeper. It was I who stopped; it took all my will. I turned away and this time Sorel, her face bone-blank, turned away with me.

  I woke up in darkness, the blind darkness of the world.

  I touched the lid of our coffin. It was porcelain, smooth and cold. I felt Sorel’s hand locked in mine in the steel grip of the dead. I felt not panic but peace.

  There was a shock, then another shock, and darkness came over the darkness, and all was still.

  “We made contact,” I heard Sorel’s voice say. I was glad. Wasn’t I?

  I was on the gurney. I sat up. My hands were burning; my fingertips were on fire.

  “The pain is just the blood coming back around,” said DeCandyle. “You were inserted into LAD space for over four hours.”

  It was unusual for him to volunteer a duration. And there was no click. I knew he was lying.

  “I’ll take him home,” Sorel said. Her voice sounded tinny and far away, as when we were dying. “I can still drive.”

  It was morning. Dawn may not “come up like thunder” as Kipling put it, but it does have a sound. I rolled down the Honda’s window and bathed in the cold air, letting the new day cover over the night’s horror like a fresh coat of paint.

  But the horror kept bleeding back through.

  “We were gone all night,” I said.

  Sorel laughed. “Try two nights,” she said. It was the first time I had heard her laugh. She seemed happy.

  She pulled up in my drive but left the engine running. I reached over and turned the key off. “I’ll come in if you want me to,” she said. “You’ll have to help me in the door.”

  I did. She could hop on one leg okay. Under her nylon NASA-style jumpsuit I was surprised to find smooth silk underwear with lace through the crotch; I could tell by my fingertips that it was white. One leg was puffy like a sausage. Her skin was tight and cool.

  “Sorel,” I said. I couldn’t call her Emma. “Are you trying to bring him back or go with him?”

  “There’s no coming back,” she said. “No body to come back to.” She pressed my hand to the stumps of her fingers, then to her cold lips, then between her cold thighs.

  “Then stay here with me,” I said.

  We fumbled for each other, our lips and fingers numb. “Don’t take my bra all the way off,” she said. She pulled one cup down and her nipple was cold and sticky and sweet. Too sweet. “It’s too late,” she said.

  “Then take me with you,” I said.

  That was the end of our last conversation.

  “Sort of a Stonehenge,” my ex said when she came by on Thursday with some microwavables. She was shuffling through my paintings again. “And what’s this? My God, Ray. Porn is one thing; this is, this is—”

  “I told you, they’re images from dreams.”

  “That makes it even worse. I hope you’re not going to show these to anybody. It’s against the law. And what’s that smell?”

  “Smell?”

  “Like something died. Maybe a raccoon or something. I’m going to send William over to check under the studio.”

  “Who’s William?”

  “You know perfectly well who William is,” she said.

  Saturday night I was awakened by a banging on the studio door.

  “DeCandyle, it’s two in the morning,” I said. “I’m not supposed to see you till Monday anyway.”

  “I need you now,” he said, “or there won’t be a Monday.” I got into the Honda with him; even when he was hurrying he drove too slowly. “I can’t get Emma to retrocute. She’s been in LAD space for over four days now. This is the longest she’s ever gone. The home tissue is starting to deteriorate. Excessive signs of morbidity.”

  She’s dead, I thought. This guy just can’t say it.

  “I let her go too often,” he said. “I left her inserted too long. Too deep. But she insisted; she’s been like a woman obsessed.”

  “Step on it or we’ll get hit from behind,” I said. I didn’t want to hear any more. I turned up the radio and we listened to Carmina Burana, an opera about a bunch of monks singing their way to Hell.

  It seemed appropriate.

  DeCandyle helped me up onto the gurney and I felt the body beside me, swollen and stiff. I quickly got used to the smell. Tentatively, with a feeling of fear, I slipped my hand into the handbasket.

  Her hand in the glove felt soft, like old cheese. Her fingers, for the first time, didn’t seek mine but lay passive. But of course—she was dead.

  I didn’t want to go. Suddenly, desperately, I didn’t want to go. “Wait,” I said. But even as I said it, I knew I hadn’t a chance. He was sending me after her. The gurney was already rolling and the sm
all square door shut with a soft click.

  I panicked; my lungs filled with the sour smell of atropine and formaldehyde. I felt my mind shrink and grow manageable. My fingers in the glove felt tiny, miserable, alone until they found hers. I expected more stumps but there were only the two. I made myself quiet and waited like a lover for the sting that would—Oh! I floated free at last, toward light, and saw the dark lab and the cars on the highway like fireflies and the mountains in the distance, and I realized with a start that I was totally conscious. Why wasn’t I dead? The lattice of light parted around me like a cloud and suddenly I was standing on the Other Side, alone; no, she was beside me. She was with the Other. We drifted, the three of us, and time looped back on itself: we had always been here.

  Why had I been afraid? This was so easy. We were inside the pens, which were a ring on the horizon in every direction, so many, so much stone; close enough to touch yet as far away as the stars I could barely remember… and at my feet, black still water.

  Plenty of darkness but no stars on the Other Side.

  I was moving. The water was still. I understood then (and I understand now) what physicists mean when they say that everything in the universe is in motion, wheeling around everything else, for I was in the black still water at the center of it all: the only thing that doesn’t move. Was it a subjective or an objective reality? The question had no significance. This was more real than anything that had ever happened to me or ever would again.

  There was certainly no joy. Yet no fear. We were filled with a cold nothingness; complete. I had always been here and will be here forever. Sorel is in front of me and in front of her—the Other—and we are moving again.

  Through the black water. Deeper and deeper. It is like watching myself go away and get smaller.

  This is no dream. Noroguchi is going under. Sorel grows smaller, following him into the black water: and I know that there is another realm beyond this one, and other realms beyond that, and the knowing fills me with a despair as thick as fear.

  And I am moving backward, alive with terror, ripping my hand from Sorel’s even as she pulls me with her; then she too is gone under.

  Gone.

  I reach up with both hands and touch the lid of my coffin. My hand out of the glove drips cold plasma down on my face. I am screaming soundlessly without air.

  Then a shock, and warm darkness. Retrocution. When I woke up I was colder than I’d ever been. DeCandyle helped me sit up.

  “No good?” He was weeping; he knew it.

  “No good,” I said. My tongue was thick and tasted bad from the plasma. Sorel’s hand was still in the handbasket, and when I reached in and and pulled it out her flesh peeled off like the skin of a rotten fruit, and stuck to my fingers.

  Outside, we could hear the protesters’ chants. It was Sunday morning.

  That was two and a half months ago.

  DeCandyle and I waited until the demonstrators left for church, and then he drove me home. “I have killed them both,” he said. Lamented. “First him and then her. With twenty years in between. Now there is no one left to forgive me.”

  “They wanted it. They used you,” I said. Like they used me.

  I made him let me off at the bottom of the drive. I was tired of him, sick of his self-pity, and I wanted to walk up to the studio alone. I couldn’t paint. I couldn’t sleep. I waited all day and all night, hoping irrationally to feel her cold touch on the back of my neck. Who says the dead can’t walk? I paced the floor all night. I must have fallen asleep for I had a dream in which she came to me, naked and shining and swollen and all mine. I woke up and lay listening to the sounds coming through the half-open window over my bed. It’s amazing how full of life the woods are, even in the winter. I hated it.

  The next Wednesday I got a call from my ex. A woman’s body had been found at the Psy Studies Institute, and there was a chance that I would be brought in to help identify it. Dr. DeCandyle had been arrested. I might be asked to testify against him, also.

  As it turned out I was never questioned. The police aren’t eager to press a blind man for an identification.

  “Especially when the university is trying to hush up the whole business,” my ex said. “Especially when the body is as erratically decomposed as this one,” said her boyfriend.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a friend in the coroner’s office,” he said. “‘Erratically’ is the word he used. He said it was the most peculiar corpse he had ever seen. Some of the organs were badly decomposed and others almost fresh; it was as if the decedent had died in stages, over a period of several years.”

  Cops love words like “decedent” and “corpse.” They, doctors, and lawyers are the only ones left that still speak Latin.

  Sorel was buried on Friday. There was no funeral, just a brief graveside procedure so the proper papers could get signed. She was buried in the part of the cemetery set aside for amputated limbs and used medical school cadavers. It was odd mourning someone I had known better dead than alive. It felt more like a wedding; when I smelled the dirt and heard it hit the coffin lid I felt I was giving away the bride.

  DeCandyle was there, handcuffed to my ex’s boyfriend. They had let him come as the next of kin.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “She was his wife,” my ex said as she led me to her cruiser so she could drive me home. “Student marriage. Separated but never divorced. I think she ran off with the Jap. The one he killed first. See how it all fits together? That’s the beauty of police work, Ray.”

  The rest of the story you already know, especially if you subscribe to the National Geographic. The story was a Ballantine Prize nominee: the first pictures ever from the other side, the far realm, or as Shakespeare put it best, the Undiscovered Country. DeCandyle even made it into People magazine: The Magellan of the Styx Speaks from his Prison Cell and my gallery show in New York was a huge success. I was able to sell, for an astonishing price, a limited edition of prints, while donating (for a generous tax break) the paintings to the Smithsonian.

  My ex and her boyfriend picked me up at the Raleigh-Durham airport when I flew back from New York. They were getting married. He had checked under the studio but found nothing. She was pregnant.

  “What’s this I hear about your fingers?” my ex asked when she called last Thursday. She no longer has time to stop by; a country woman cooks for me. I explained that I had lost the tips of two fingers to what my doctor claims is the only case of frostbite in North Carolina during the exceptionally mild winter of 199-. Somehow my touch for painting has gone with them, but no one needs to know that yet.

  It’s spring at last. The wet earth smells remind me of the grave and awaken in me a hunger that painting can no longer fill, even if I had my fingers. I have painted my last. My ex—excuse me, the future Mrs. William Robertson Cherry—and her boyfriend—excuse me, fiancé—have assured me that they will send a driver to pick me up and bring me to the wedding next Sunday.

  I may not make it, though. I have a silver shotgun behind the door that I can ride like a rocket anytime I want to.

  And I hate weddings. And spring.

  And envy the living.

  And love the dead.

  ARE THERE ANY QUESTIONS?

  Welcome.

  I’m glad to see you all looking so alert, so eager, so prosperous this morning. I promise you that at the end of our little talk and tour, you’ll be even more eager, and potentially more prosperous, because you didn’t come here to be entertained. You came here to get in on the ground floor, and “ground” is a good word for it, of the most unique investment opportunity since the opening of the American West.

  So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, as my grandad used to say. We’re here to talk about something people don’t usually like to talk about. Even though there’s plenty of it around. Last year, in 1999, the average family in the New York metropolitan area produced 157.4 pounds of it in a week. This comes to 645,527 cubic yards of it a day, o
r—uncompacted—an Empire State Building every 16.4 days or a truckload every six and a half minutes.

  What in the world is he talking about? Well, we all know, don’t we? You there, madam, on the second row. I can see your lips forming the very word itself.

  But you’re wrong.

  I’m not talking about garbage. Not anymore. I’m talking about real estate. I’m talking about land.

  “Land,” my granddad used to say, “is the only surefire investment there is, because God’s not making any more of it.”

  He was right about it being a surefire investment. But he was wrong about why. Because even though God’s not making any more of it, we at Eden-Prudential are. But I don’t have to tell you folks that. That’s why you’re here.

  I see some of you are getting your calculators out. Good. Let’s look at those numbers again. 11,987,058 cubic meters of solid waste, and that’s what we can collect, process, transport, and place in a month, can, in the right hands, translate to a quarter acre of beautiful mountain view property, or sixteen feet of ocean front. Notice I say “in the right hands.” That’s where Eden-Prudential comes in. Even as you and I speak, EP’s trucks are running and EP’s barges are under sail. We have four fleets of 138 trucks apiece—all independent contractors, by the way; real mom ‘n’ pop types—operating from our catchment and processing center on Staten Island. Every eighteen minutes sees five trucks dispatched, three to south Jersey, and two to Montauk; all working around the clock to make America not only more prosperous than ever, but a little bit bigger. And more valuable.

  But enough poetry. Let’s talk opportunity. What area produces the most solid waste in the world, per square mile of already existing land? The New York metropolitan area. And what area contains the world’s most valuable real estate? Or to put it another way: is there any other place in the world where land is in such short supply and where people are so willing—not to mention able—to pay for it?

  Again, you just can’t beat the New York area.