The Heavy Bear

by Tim Bowling

  A sudden hope sprang up in me. “What about your siblings? Do they also try to . . .”

  She blinked rapidly and started pulling at a hangnail. “I don’t have any. One was enough, my mom always says.” The tiny breaking of the glass around her almost drowned out the words. “But I know she’s had some abortions. She thinks I don’t know, but I’m not stupid.”

  No, you’re not stupid. Before I could stop myself, the question spilled out. “Some?”

  She shrugged her large shoulders, but they had no linebacker’s power now. “Two or three, anyway. Usually not long after she gets a new boyfriend.”

  At a loss, I sought some kind of distraction. I looked around the food court to find it. But Keaton still hadn’t moved. He stood there, in front of Chelsea’s father’s empty childhood home, waiting for the front of it to crash down over him.

  But Delmore obliged, though his voice was space cold and heavy; it seemed to drag like an anchor through the greasy tide. “Consider Frost, that folksy bard. Once, in the middle of the night, he forced his wife into their daughter’s bedroom, woke the girl up, drew her attention to the revolver in his hand and said ‘Choose!’”

  My God, I mouthed, and it could have been either to Chelsea or to the dead poet-bear whose tears gathered thick and black as oil.

  “I make no judgment,” Delmore continued. “Frost buried four children.”

  Four? The distraction was hardly a help. I returned my attention to Chelsea, who had taken her phone out and was fiddling with it. Greg Arious, strangely silent this whole conversation, kept glancing up at her. Even Keaton had finally moved half the distance closer. It was impossible not to see him slowly approaching the knocked-upon door that he opened, after not seeing his sons for nearly ten years, to find them there as young men. They had found his famous life, and it, too, was, in a sense, abandoned. But at least he had been forced away by the rage and bitterness of the boys’ mother. Even so, even so, Buster . . . you should have tried harder. What film was more important?

  “Genius always means failure,” Delmore snorted. “The more of a shit you are, the bigger your talent. I tried – oh, how I tried. But somehow I just didn’t have it in me. If you can be awful to people and keep your sanity, that’s true genius.”

  I stopped listening to him. His scornful critique of society’s romanticized notions of talent seemed remarkably trivial under the circumstances. Yet I had not lost sympathy for him; I knew, from reading his biography, that his childhood had been haunted by his father’s constant infidelities. At one terrible point, he had even been witness, in a restaurant, to his mother confronting his father and his latest female friend. That wasn’t exactly something you’d forget. No wonder there’s so much pain in the story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.”

  I turned my full attention to Chelsea, desperate to find some way to comfort her. My silence seared through my chest.

  “Anyway,” she said, and slipped her phone into her coat pocket. “Thanks.”

  “For what?” I managed to respond.

  “For him.” She held her hand out and the little monkey grasped her thumb and squealed. The hooded teens at a nearby table looked up cobra-like from their runic pursuits and turned in unison. Smartly, Chelsea gently closed her coat around the squeals. “For letting me keep him. It says online that capuchins can live up to forty years.” She smiled down into his babyish face and mumbled, “So, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, because I could think of nothing else to say. I’d done nothing so noble. It was only Metalhead’s aggression and my own alienation from the vulgar world that had forced my hand, not compassion for this young woman’s loneliness, which, in truth, I hadn’t really noticed, being entirely fixated on my own psychic state.

  Nothing, in short, had changed, yet something had been clarified between us. We both sensed it. Somehow the awful artificial light of the food court – the manufactured glare that needed a Vermeer to redeem it – seemed a kilowatt or two gentler. We sat calmly in it, not quite looking at each other, not quite looking away, either. It seemed a small kindness to be nice to her. But I suddenly realized that being drawn into another person’s world was much stranger than stealing a monkey or finding a thirty-thousand-dollar mechanical toy, stranger than any poem or film.

  “We should go find this Harvard dude,” Chelsea said at last.

  Delmore, quick as ever, took his chance. “But Tim’s not smart enough to go to Harvard, kid.”

  “Very amusing, very droll.” But I was grateful for the change in tone. It had been a draining few minutes, the kind that requires a shower for the psyche. I checked my watch. My afternoon class was still a few hours away, the room waiting there like a doctor’s office in the middle of the night, waiting for the succession of widened eyes and the man with the chart. “I have the results of your test back,” he says. “I’m afraid the news is not good.” I knew I couldn’t face the job, but I did have to return to campus and announce the cancellation. The chances of encountering another Chelsea were about as high as stealing another capuchin monkey, a thought that, on the surface, should have comforted me: I didn’t exactly relish any further adventure. Yet, the thought did not comfort. In fact, as I rose from the mass-produced table in the mass-designed food court, the thought began to ache. And because I lacked the courage or the energy to analyze the ache, I had to ignore it, just as I ignored the ache in my knee. Delmore’s prolonged sigh of brotherhood and his heavy paw on my shoulder certainly didn’t help: I knew exactly how he’d define the ache. But I wasn’t an egomaniacal middle-aged poet from the 1950s constantly needing my fragile ego massaged; I was . . . what was I? Afraid, lonely, heartsick at the tears in things, at what the Japanese call the slender sadness, all the loss and fulfillment of life hanging there in the dawn sky’s sliver of moon. O what did Whitman mean when he wrote, “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? / I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.”

  THE LINES stayed on my lips as I took my place beside Chelsea on the escalator and rose slowly towards the common level of the day. And they stayed on my lips as the artificial light of the mall gave way to the lambent late summer sunlight that softened the edges of the skyscrapers and the sidewalks, but not the faces of the strangers whose luck was no business of mine. I could note the differences in each face, the unique composition of bones and features, but they were all the same, all human and bound for loss. Why weren’t the faces rent by screams? Why did the earth not open and swallow us all and be done with it?

  As the bloody hand of the intersection light changed to the little white man and I obeyed, the sweat beaded on my brow and my step leadened. I dropped slightly behind Chelsea as my mind raced ahead. This day will end, and you will return to what is meant to distract you but can only destroy you: the getting and the spending, the interminably quick subtraction of time, the grief in the last look of your grieving children, the knowledge that can’t be put off but is put off, grandly, in the building of a vaudeville theatre, and tragically, in the abuse of a child and in the boardrooms of violence. Where were all these strangers going? The theatre’s gone, I wanted to shout. The Three Keatons are gone, and everyone they know. There! There! Can’t you see Buster’s ghost?

  For it stood, unsmiling as ever, just ahead of me, holding open one of the library’s glass doors. Bone-white face, space-black eyes, the high cheekbones of a proud and defeated race. And though it looked at every passing face, as I looked at every passing face, I knew why the ghost was really there. Behind me, Delmore sighed – in expectation, I realized – for he was a man – he had been a man – whom art had kept alive until his heart burst. And movies, almost as much as literature, had been blood to him.

  When I passed Keaton’s ghost, and caught up with Chelsea inside, I said to her, “They play chess upstairs. I’ll be along in a moment. I have to use the washroom.”

  “No!” Delmore said ferociously. “Stay with her.”

  “Why? What are y
ou –”

  “For once in your goddamned life, stop asking questions.”

  His look froze me. It was brutal in its insistence, and for a moment I was stymied.

  “There.” He pointed.

  Across the open space of the library’s main level (whole shelves of books had recently been removed to improve the sightlines between the security guards and the troubled youth who congregated at the computers), I saw Keaton’s ghost. He stood by a computer terminal, his face oddly lit by the images on the screen.

  I struggled to explain the situation to Chelsea.

  “You know that poster I bought? Of Buster Keaton? I’d like to show you one of his films. Well, part of one, anyway.”

  She shrugged, smiled, said, “cool.” And waited.

  “Lay on, Macduff,” Delmore said gruffly.

  Now Keaton seemed like an usher, his whole being the flashlight that directed us to our seats. Even Greg Arious understood that entertainment was in store; he chattered and chirped so loudly that the troubled teens had to turn up the volume of their “Fuck yous” to be audible. A tall, gaunt security guard – fresh off the killing fields of the Sudan – looked on through eyes that were like bullet holes filled with blood. Sensibly, he didn’t move. He didn’t appear to notice either the cursing or the monkey’s excitement; perhaps he didn’t notice anything. Did that make him better off in this second decade of the twenty-first century? What melting ice caps? What mass conformity? What exploited peasant class? What shrinking rainforest? What dulled emotion?

  The questions dissolved as soon as I reached the screen. Across it rolled Keaton’s great gift to us all.

  “This is Sherlock Jr.,” I whispered to Chelsea. “It was made in 1924. Those two men are trying to kill Buster with an exploding billiard ball.”

  And so it was, all over again. The villainous butler, having left the table for Buster – as the famous detective, Sherlock Jr. – to run, bolts from the room in anticipation of the killing blast. When it fails to arrive, he creeps back to the doorway to watch. Buster sinks shot after shot without striking the tampered ball. Finally, there is no choice; the ball is the next to be struck. Nothing. Silence in the silence of the silent movie. Our faces – mine, Chelsea’s, Delmore’s, even the pale-pink little mask of Greg Arious – had inched closer to the images on the screen, closer to each other. Our grin became one grin. Keaton’s ghost, too, shared in it, though there was no change in his expression. After all, comedy is serious business. If a preview for a movie mattered in 1924, how much more did a post-view matter in 2012? Keaton had suffered enough to know the answer; he knew the value of his art to the human condition, even if most humans didn’t know. I marvelled yet again at his youthful grace and skill. The scene at the pool table, for example. There’s no fakery in it. Keaton himself made all the shots in the order they needed to be made so that the gag would work. It required hundreds of takes; it had to be perfect. He failed and failed again. You couldn’t shortcut a gag any more than you could turn your back on an old friend and colleague whose career had been destroyed by scandal.

  “He’s really good-looking,” Chelsea said, as the camera moved in for a close-up. “He must have been a big star.”

  “One of the biggest,” I said. The pride I felt couldn’t be sustained. The crying man on the MGM set, the straitjacketed alcoholic, the absent father, the bit player in the beach blanket movies, the cancerous old man who didn’t know he had cancer: I kept seeing these figures step out of the sleeping figure of the good-looking boy-projectionist.

  Delmore knew what I saw, and he didn’t like it. At least, he didn’t like my failure to be completely immersed in the film. “Give the old boy a break, won’t you? Everybody suffers, everybody fails. But hardly anybody leaves anything behind that can make a girl and a monkey happy almost a hundred years later.”

  He was right, of course. Intellectually, I agreed. But on every other level I simply couldn’t see the blood in the security guard’s eyes drain away because of some flickering images salvaged off some fragile nitrate film stock. Yet, what kind of person couldn’t delight in Buster’s sinking of the final shot, his clean escape (he had replaced the exploding ball), his outwitting of the villains and his eventual winning of the girl? But wait, the winning of the girl: wasn’t it ambiguous, even troubled? After the madcap chase scene with the legendary risky stunts, after the restoration of justice, Sherlock Jr. ends with Buster puzzled by a future involving a wife and two babies (a future that paralleled his difficult present at the time). That enigmatic face, I knew, would become tortured and tear-stained a decade later. A kind of time-lapse photography of human suffering played before my eyes, and my grin dissolved.

  “We should go,” I said.

  Chelsea’s puzzled face turned to me. “Professor . . .” She hesitated. “I walked over here with you, and the movie was already on the screen.”

  “Uh-oh,” Delmore said. “Time for a deus ex machina. I’ll see what I can do.”

  I couldn’t very well tell her that the ghost of Buster Keaton, who had been travelling with me most of the day, had set everything up. I couldn’t say, “Well, Keaton was always fascinated with technologies. If he hadn’t been a comedian, he would have liked to have been a mechanical engineer. He used to chide Chaplin because Chaplin hated TV and wouldn’t let his kids watch it. If you’re not careful, Keaton’s ghost will steal your cellphone and take it apart to see how it works, like he did with the first movie camera he ever saw.”

  But I didn’t have to speak. I didn’t know what Delmore had done, but suddenly a fight broke out amongst the teens, the security guard woke from his horrified catatonia and ambled towards them, and I took the opportunity to say, “Come on, let’s go upstairs. If the police show up, I don’t want them to find you and your little buddy.”

  So we moved on, walking up the broken escalator, with Delmore breathing raspingly behind and Keaton’s ghost, of course, already at the top, bent over, inspecting the unmoving corrugated iron steps. I knew the main branch of the library well, and so, once we’d passed Keaton, I didn’t hesitate.

  To the immediate right of the reference librarian counter were two dozen computer terminals, in pairs and back to back, with various patrons huddled before them. Ten feet beyond the computers, several figures sat hunched at tables over chessboards. Not everyone and everything had been digitized. The scene warmed me, the way a cabin’s orange light shines at night through the dark woods to warm an exhausted traveller. Slowly, I led our advance upon the contemplative human past.

  I SCANNED THE chess players’ faces for Harvard, the balloonatic toy merchant, but couldn’t spot him at first. The players composed rather a motley crew (Metalhead the monkey abuser should have been there): an elderly Asian man with a face like a melted wax blossom, a high-cheekboned Slav with pre-Communist-era Coke-bottle glasses, a fat young man in a short-sleeved White Stripes T-shirt that revealed his marbled ham-hock arms, and a petite red-haired woman in a pale-green pantsuit who must have been my age but who gazed down at the board with all the giddiness of Anne of Green Gables after tippling Madeira. The intensity coming off these faces was different than the intensity coming off the faces of the patrons at the computer terminals; the former were more committed somehow, relying on the prospect of a remote and satisfying future, whereas the latter were hardly adjustable in their torpid ecstasy, changing little with each mouse-click. The chess players might have been staring directly into their own fates, but without panic or even unease, with, rather, a kind of inspiring yet terrifying philosophical calm. Taken together, the computer users and the chess players smashed the glowing window of my dream cabin in the woods. And one player, notably more intense and still, clenched his long, narrow hands so tightly that it seemed blood must run through his fingers. Watching him over the chessboard was like watching someone flay the skin off his face with thought.

  At first I didn’t connect him to the homeless street merchant floating along Jasper Avenue on his blue recycling bag b
alloon ship. Perhaps it was the fluorescent lighting of the library, the institutional near silence of murmurs and coughs and unidentifiable electronic hums and beeps, or the lack of motion – something came between me and my memory of the man. As I studied him – the bloodshot eyes in the sparse, nicotine-yellowed beard made him look like a Custer who had survived Little Bighorn and gone to seed on narcotics – I wanted that something to be a brick wall. But this was Harvard. And by now the day had its own strange momentum. I couldn’t fail my entrance exam.

  As I stepped towards the chess table, however, Delmore grabbed my shoulder. I turned to see his eyes widened to dinner plates and more human than ever over the great bear’s snout. It was as if the young man who had written the poem was fighting with terrible desperation to return to the world through the legacy of what he’d created.

  “Don’t,” he said, and pulled so hard on my shoulder that I staggered back a step.

  “Are you okay, Professor?” Chelsea squinted at my obvious confusion. She waited, two feet off to one side and slightly behind, her coat zipped almost to her chin.

  “Yes. I’m fine.” I was still looking at Delmore. His whole great bearish bulk was trembling like a blancmange.

  “It’s death,” he said hoarsely. “It’s death. I can smell it.”

  His claws sank into my skin. His voice rose. “Stop and turn around. Go back. Now.”

  Grimacing, I pulled away from his thick paw. It fell off into the dry air like a block of ice. Chelsea waited, her expression still quizzical, verging on concerned. All at once, I felt foolish. After all, she was young; all her ghosts were still living, and her absent father, a phantom, was nevertheless real. How could I explain to her the presence of the spirits that took fifty years to conjure? More than embarrassed, I was unwilling to add to her troubles. Let her save her concern for herself, her mother, even the little primate her courage and optimism had rescued from a dreary existence.