by Rafi Zabor
The Bear Conies Home 67
The Bear heard a new heaviness in his tone come forward to meet the density of the changes and curl at their base hke waves around a rock at the sea's edge, and he modified his mouth's grip on the reed to emphasize the intentness of his attack and detail the implications of the encounter: adaptive music meets world of obdurate fact: question: will the water ever wear the rock away? In one lifetime, for example his? At the moment it seemed unlikely, but you never know: there are other waters, other shores.
He heard the rhythm section part behind him and make way, opening a space before framing a response. Thank you, guys. It's a gesture of respect and I'm grateful. Donelian played a chord stacked with fourths and sixths not normally in his repertoire; Scott Lee rumbled through the lower storeys of his instrument and threw open a few dark rooms, disused till then; Billy muttered amid his tomtoms to imply a shaking of foundations, a shifting of low stones. The Bear raised up a cry and let it fall dissonant and unresolved, certainly unsatisfied, perhaps forlorn. He didn't want to live in this house but he was certainly there for the moment. He extended his solo into another chorus and entered every room. His life was going to change.
What's more, he thought, looking through the strangeness of the nightclub at Cummins behind the recording console, that was twelve, maybe fifteen minutes long and a keeper no matter how weird it was. So they were getting something done.
He played a fast impromptu blues straight out of the cadenza to blow some of his steam off, and although he played fluently and bitterly enough he knew he would do better by the end of the night, and probably better than that tomorrow. By then there would be enough for a record. Okay, he thought, and allowed himself the smallest and most sardonic of smiles. Okay. It's not what I planned but it will have to do. He walked up to the microphone to say a few words of nonsense and announce the next tune.
They had been told to wait for the end of the set, but the youngest man on the squad must have gotten edgy. "NEW YORK CITY POLICE!" he called out, and jumped to his feet with a strange-looking gun held stiffly out in ft-ont of him in both hands. "FREEZE!"
The Bear was aware of screams, falling tables and breaking glass as he threw the mikestand and took off for the kitchen doors. He heard an oddly muffled-sounding gunshot, and when he looked back over his shoulder he almost laughed: they were getting it all wrong: the cop had fired into the air all right, but it was a tranquilizer gun, and a brightly feathered tranquifizer dart was quivering anomalously on the ceiling. To top off this bit of farce, someone shouted, ''Stop in the name of the lawT
68 Rafi Zabor
Good Lord, the Bear asked himself as he raced through the kitchen and sphntered the back door open with his shoulder, did somebody actually say that? He upended the patrolman who had been waiting for him in the alley, vaulted a low cinderblock wall, landed on all fours and took off at forty miles an hour down a parallel alley. Now that the long-feared bust had finally come down on him he felt oddly liberated. No more half measures. No more obscurities. Let's have it out. Let it come down. He climbed a section of cyclone fence, came out on the sidewalk and sprinted through the dark for Second Avenue, listening for the sound of pursuit and hearing only his claws on cement. But they'd be coming.
A portrait of the artist as a hunted animal: he paused at the edge of the Avenue's brightness to consider his possible strategies. He could look for some indoor place to hole up in or brazen it out among the populace. The latter alternative appealed to his sense of humor, besides which he was only five minutes' walk from his apartment and maybe ten from Iris' place—it was twice the distance but no one would look for him there.
PulUng down on his hat and up on the collar of his coat, the Bear raised himself onto his hindlegs and prepared to face the music of the Avenue. Almost immediately he could tell he wasn't going to make it. He'd succeeded in passing through crowds before, but tonight he was out of phase. He reeked anomaly. As soon as he turned the comer, people started backing away and making noises. A skinny girl in black leather and a head of rooster hair let out a scream. A number of dark mouths dropped open. "It's all right," he told them. "Let me through, I'm a doctor." A young couple in down jackets staggered backward away from him into traffic. A taxi swerved to avoid them and a chorus of horns went up; everywhere the Bear detected faces spinning in his direction. Here it is, he told himself, you've defied the laws of gravity long enough.
With a sweat breaking out under his fur and the distinct sensation that he was acting something out that had happened long ago, he dropped again to all fours, aimed himself uptown and took off along the storefronts, running through banded light, a shock of purple and green, then white, as the thin legs of the people skittered and scattered. He was aware of a gathering tumult some distance behind him and took the first available left into relative dark. Passing alongside a high brick wall down which rivulets of water ran, he found a rusted metal door, broke it in with his shoulder and headed down through a wilderness of stairs, aware at the same time that he was passing through some landscape implicit in himself. He collided with a number of heavy objects and came at last to a halt. He stood in darkness and listened. A siren dopplered off outside and his nostrils filled with the smell of rusted iron. Someplace nearby, water dripped regularly onto stone.
The Bear Comes Home 69
In a few minutes his perspiration dried and his heart quieted closer to normal. He groped his way forward and then slowly up the first iron stairway that presented itself, followed it through a series of precarious and irregular turnings, and then had to clamber up onto some kind of shelf. He had the sensation, as he stood, of having come out into a large open space. When his eyes adjusted themselves he made out, very high above him, a bit of broken ceiling through which faint light filtered slantwise down. He was on a kind of platform, overlooking a landscape of broken timbers and upthrust flooring. In fact he was on the stage of an abandoned theater, and as he retraced his run up the Avenue he understood that he had broken through the side door of the old Fillmore East, descended to its basement and then come slowly upstairs. Fifty years before, Carnovsky had done his famous Yiddish Lear here, and more recently the psychedelic age had blown east to this platform on a sea of purple billows. Now it was his turn, the one and only Bear.
"World," he said.
There was a noise from the pit and three powerful flashlights clicked on and shined in his face. "Hello," he told them, doing the voice. "I'm Mr. Ed." A fourth policeman standing behind the first three raised a kind of lantern and the Bear was able to see them all. It may have been the irregularity of the lighting, but they appeared to be wearing red or blue rubber noses. And why not. Wasn't he a bear in a raincoat and a hat? The Bear felt terribly sleepy. His eyes closed; he wanted to lie down.
This is what I get for rising to the bait, he thought. What a sap I've been. Music, a career, even love. Can you believe it, ladies and gentlemen? I wanted to live.
"We can shoot you with a dart full of PCP where you stand," a big white-haired man in an overcoat told him in a conversational tone of voice, "so it would be better if you don't try to run."
One of the uniformed cops, stepping uncertainly through the rubble on the floor, then pausing, had a question for his superior: "How do we get the bear off the stage?"
"You can't," the Bear told him. "It's in his blood."
''What was that?" the detective asked him sharply.
They shot him full of animal tranquilizer before leading him out of the theater into the street. He was semipleasantly dazed, but recognized the true iron cold of winter on his fur when they reached open air. A heavy black truck—CORRECTIONS, he read on its side—had pulled up to the curb, and rings of people were watching him. He felt so ashamed. This was something he himself had produced. It told on him, accused him of lapsed taste,
yo Rafi Zabor
bad imaginative form. Paranoia is the last refuge of the unimaginative. And you call yourself an artist. This is very crudely done.
There was a dark green tanker truck: Mystic Transport: By Serving We Grow . . . no, there was no such truck. He'd seen it somewhere else, some other time. The overabundance of signifiers was a trick of the increasing blur of drug and spin of mind. It was his doing.
As he stumbled forward a cry rose from the crowd. Obedient to the occasion, he covered his face with his hat, then tried to laugh at the gag but could not.
They threw him semiconscious into the back of the Corrections truck. He was sped dazed and blinded through half-familiar streets. Later, his body would retain the memory of painful blows from blunt instruments. Bassoons? Miscellany ensued. His last clear memory was of being thrown heavily into a cell. "That oughta hold you for awhile," a voice told him. His saxophone was thrown in after him. Someone must have retrieved it from the club. It hit him in the face, and before he spun downward into a brown and uncomforting darkness he became aware of eyes watching him. Was the world shrinking to a dot or expanding beyond recognition? Possibly the eyes were his own. No, too intent, too steady.
Iris? Jones?
They were not there.
Was he?
pOB^I llVO
Listen to this reed forlorn, Breathing ever since ^twas torn From its rushy bed: a strain Of impassioned love and pain:
""The secret of my song, though near, None can see and none can hear. 0 for a friend to know the sign And mingle all his soul with mine.
^Tis the flame of love that fired me, The wine of love inspired me. Would you learn how lovers bleed? Then listen, listen to the reed. "
— Rumi
]oncs opened one eye and the entire physical universe reappeared, in all its smug ubiquity. Considering it, Jones closed the offending eye and succeeded in going back to sleep for another half an hour. But that was all he could manage and eventually he had to wake up.
When he opened his eyes again, the waking world discovered him lying on his back, arms flung melodramatically cruciform, a corner of cotton top-sheet covering his privates. Looking up, he saw what might have been the first fly of spring doing its geometry lesson in the air above him, inscribing a series of severely cut, highly regular angles against the veined white background of the bedroom ceiling. Jones couldn't decide if the bug was building triangles or squares or some phantom revolving unresolvellogram—the angles seemed exact and absolute but the overall form of the figure kept shifting by inscrutable increments and he couldn't make out what it really was. Maybe it was weaving the shape of his fate, if he still had one, which he doubted. In any case, Jones told himself, this was quite a fly. It also occurred to Jones that the Five Platonic Solids would make a good name for a doo-wop outfit. He also liked the Peptides, and was partial to the Thousand Natural Shocks, but thought the name unwieldy.
Another thing he didn't understand about the fly, about all the flies of spring for that matter—did they grow out of this exacting schoolwork into the larger roving, eating, mating model, or were there two entirely different kinds of fly in the world, one of them interested only in food and fornication and the other inexplicably obsessed with the demands of ideal form? Was such a thing possible? If so, it implied a pretty severe division of labor in the kingdom of the flies, and a host of tedious things about the world in general.
74 Rafi Zabor
"Fm not quite carrion yet," he told the fly in any case. Jones was the kind of guy who talked to animals.
"Little fly, who made thee?" he asked it after awhile. "Dost thou know who made thee?" He lit a cigarette, inhaled its dose of poison and blew the smoke off to one side of the fly's workspace. Who set you so exact a lesson? How inscribed it in your genes or tiny mind? Did He smile His work to see? Did He who made the Bear make thee?
This last consideration landed heavily in his heart and prodded the beast of his guilt back into being. Jones lurched up from his mattress insufficiently armed into the accusative light of day and stumbled out of the bedroom pursued by a Bear. Whom he had failed. Whom he had abandoned into imprisonment or annihilation or worse for how many months now? Get out of this bedroom. Jones blinked into the long daylit rectangle of the living room and found a moment's sweet unconsciousness standing there naked in the doorframe until his moral clock ticked again, audible and relentless, and the beast resumed its motion. He dragged his rambling sense of catastrophe toward the bathroom at the rear of the apartment but stopped en route to browse for a paperback to read while on the toilet. Bookshelves lined the right-hand living room wall floor to ceiling and front to back. Jones himself was a scattershot reader, but the Bear was a hardy omnivore who consumed virtually everything in his path. Fiction. History. The mystics. Time was, start him going on Meister Eckhart or Ibn 'Arabi and you could close down the store for the day. Jones himself had not had much mystical experience—unless his liaison with the Bear counted, and he wasn't sure—and so could only follow the Bear's line of thought with insufficient rational analogues. When the Bear got on a long mystical jag, it seemed to Jones, he could be tedious to listen to after the first twenty minutes or so.
Jones pulled down a copy of the Penguin Cha7l;erhouse of Farma —the Bear's favorite novel, although Jones had never understood why—and lapsed with it heavily onto the sagging green sofa, which as he landed exhaled along with galactic whorls of dust an unforeseen intensity of Bear-smell. For a dizzy moment Jones reeled at the richness of that remembered Hfe. Although his time with the Bear had been no picnic, it had been incomparably meaningful to live through, had been a Hfe worthy of the name which had allotted him, for a time, a special fate, someone to be in the world and a niche in which to be it: a role he understood, something stable and resonant and sure. Now it was not the Bear but the Void that snuffled around the apartment and took up all the available space, the Void that nipped at his heels in the street and ate away at him morning, noon and night. It was his fault the Bear was gone, or dead, or whatever, wherever, he was. Everything had been his fault, always. Selah.
The Bear Comes Home 75
When younger, Jones had been a man of obvious potential, smart, funny, not too bad-looking, with an engaging manner and a certain flair: a typical strolling boho with artistic tastes and predilections, if no art, and the habit of ready money; but in the conversion of his potential to actuality, the solvae and coagiilae had fallen short of alchemy and left something leaden behind in the alembic. Too hip for corporate Hfe, too fanny a take on things for academia, he had waited tables, hacked a little journalism, done a couple of character roles off-off-Broadway—had a small hit as Dr. Van Helsing in an avant-garde Dracula but never realized his dream of playing anyone, absolutely anyone, in Chekhov—hung out around petty crooks and carny characters, in short had done a lot and not much really. Which was cool as long as the years didn't add up and the talk and food were still good. But by the time he started hanging out with Russian emigres on the circus circuit, money was running short, the outiook was grimming out, and he was starting to feel that he had pretty fundamentally fucked up the practical project of his life.
One of the bright moments, he'd thought at the time, but certainly not one of ultimate consequence, had been drawing three cards into a full house, kings up jacks, that night against the Great Vichinsky. Vichinsky had been drinking too much vodka and grinding on as usual about the popularity in Ameriky of those focking kets, and the lack of feehng for his old, once-respected specialty—they were, Jone, the soul of all real circus, all the filling and pothos of real circus, and me with only the one cub left I been able to defect with in great democratic city of Cincinnati and what good? Who recognized? My cousin physicist still driving keb. And why? Jealousy is why. No understanding of life is why. Ameriky is why. Nice shiny surface, nichevo underneath. I see you and raise you feefty. I know I don't have. You win you take bearcub, okay? I all finished with life already anyhow.
Lookin
g back through the flawed optics of retrospection, Jones had to admit that by the time he beat Vichinsky at poker he had reached the same dead end a few times over and had begun to daydream idly about the gaspipe. Which was how Vichinsky had tried to end it a couple of weeks after the card game. Jones had offered him the bearcub back and Vichinsky had refused, with the usual melodramatic trappings, no matter how much Jones insisted. Where was Vichinsky these days? Jones hoped he was doing all right.
He read the same sentence ten or so times over—something about that idiot Fabrizio del Dongo buying a couple of barrels of Nebbiolo for someone or other—without gleaning any sense from it, until his cigarette was done and then, still drenched in the unexpected scent of Bear and before the waking world could tug him into further motion, he remembered the earliest days in the apartment with the bearcub he'd only kept as a goof on how
76 Rafi Zabor
low-comic a thing his Hfe had gotten to be—going by the name Jones when his real name meant Garden-on-the-Mountain in another language was another one-man in-joke on what a nonentity he'd become. The dumbhead furry fucker blundered into the hirniture and scratched up the woodwork but also seemed at times to understand his subtlest inner workings: would sometimes mimic his moods, it seemed to him, with a finely honed parodic edge— he'd be sitting in an armchair, say, feeling sorry for himself, and on the floor at his feet the cub might put its head in its hands in a classic woe-is-me pose and start moaning and rocking. Then to amplify the point it would get up and walk nose first into the wall right next to an open doorway, as if to say .. . Then there were the things that really didn't tally: you'd come into a room and find the cub with a book open on its lap—it'd look up, clock your entrance and start licking the pages or put on a glazed expression and pee on the carpet. Then, of course, there was the intent if more explicable way— since bears were known to respond to the stuff—the cub listened to music.