by Rafi Zabor
Bars separated him from the adjacent cell but breezeblock ended the view
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after that. If he angled himself forward against his left-hand wall and didn't lose his balance to the Hdless toilet, he could see a distance down the hall to his right, but there wasn't much to see. Tall barred windows high up the opposite, institutional-green wall revealed only slants of sky through the reinforced glass across from a line of what the Bear estimated to be twelve cells in six walled pairs—assuming consistency from his own premises, a universal subjective constant but always a chancy prospect. The windows—their height suggested a second storey of similar cells, but he had never heard a sound up there—let some blessed daylight in, but little of it ever contacted him directly. As the season advanced, who knew? Anything was possible, within reason.
The concrete details were well enough made, but in his clearer moments the Bear knew it all for the cheapjack flummery he'd had to live with ever since he'd wawled his way into the farce of matter. Lord was he ever weary of it. As far as he was concerned, any actual imprisonment was pure redundancy, unsubtle explicitation, was getting stuck in the rear with a point that had already been made clear some time ago. It was an error of taste for him to be here.
At the hall's unseeable end there was an audibly heavy door that opened and shut to admit or occlude Tim and the Bear's other less sympathetic keepers, and the wandering Doc Friedmann when he was of a mind to set a spell; beyond that door, it seemed to the Bear, was another zone devoted to absence and amnesia, the better for him to be forgotten, and beyond that, perhaps, the fall vitality of bureaucratic life went on, thickly populated and on regulation march to the suppositious music played on this part of the planet. Life without syncopation and solos, but there were water coolers out there and people chatting beside them. Typewriters. Coffee machines. Life in all its forms, no matter how thinly made or how hard it got for him personally, he would always love it. Was that his big mistake?
Yes, truth was, he felt a little isolated here.
The Kabbalists were right: where essence is restricted, form becomes explicit and pronounced, all bar and slab, barrier and plane: no curves, no Hfe ticking over but lots of form. As in the subways, so here: QUpoth: the land of shells, and he was in it.
Almost wistfully he turned his head to the right on his pillow to scan Doc Friedmann's belongings in their modest homey array in the next cell. Friedmann was not a fellow prisoner, nor was he a keeper, anymore. He was, given the joint's restrictive conditions, something like a friend. The management had let Friedmann bring in a small wooden table and a chair. On the table sat an alarm clock that needed winding, an ashtray, a yellow packet of pipecleaners
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beside which a couple of rudimentary tar-browned pipecleaner animals attempted to stroll and graze despite their deficiencies of form.
The good Herr Friedmann had also left behind a bunch of curling clippings from the New York Times and a crooked stack of books. Bible, too much Thomas Mann for the Bear's taste—if it's German make mine Kafka, though this was not really the place in which one wanted to read him—tiny green volumes of Chekhov stories as stilted by Garnett, and various scatterings mostly from the last century, fiction and memoirs, no straight histories as such. The Doc, of course, lent freely, and would bring in things for the Bear on request. When the Bear asked for Shakespeare, though, Friedmann had actually asked if he wanted the Schlegel edition or "the English version." To his credit, Friedmann had quickly slapped himself on the forehead after this faux pas and said "Akh" in the approved comic manner. The Bear turned his head left and rolled his eyes back to look at his alto leaning in the corner like a tout. More dead weight. Leaky pads and Rico reed forlorn. Full moon and empty arms. Should I play a little?
Nah. Nap is what's called for. Still the tail end of winter, by what I can tell from the advancing windowlight, and sleep should be my natural talent, though I was never much of a hibernator. Nap and then let's see. Confirmation. Now's the Time. Constellation. Good Night Irene.
The beginning of the Bear's imprisonment had conformed to the melodramatic expectations he had had of it. In the Bud Powell Wing of whatever bunghole they had sent him to, the Bear got hosed down with ammoniated water and zapped with electric prods when he charged the bars of his cell screaming about how they couldn't cage the hght—a memorable phrase that had come from some drugged correspondence between his own sense of himself as a cosmic tree reaching up toward fundamental sun and the memory of the lightbulbs he'd seen in the subways of his cubhood when Jones had taken him down into the stations and the tunnels: the yellow bulbs grinding out their sallow light were caged in black bulb-shaped matrices of iron. When he was still small enough to ride the trains without freaking out the populace, Jones used to hold him up, not without difficulty, to the front window of the lead car so that he could see the brown square frames of the tunnel coming at him, the inset lightbulbs, the litde keynote points of blue. The best ride was the A train between Fifty-ninth and 125th Street of course, longest stretch in the system, a subterranean jet ride, a vision of time's excitement, a taste of things to come. At the end of certain stations there had been
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green-lit control rooms with men and women in dun-colored uniforms working boards of intricate red and green lights with silver levers; in his youth and innocence it had seemed to the Bear that they were regulating the movements of all the people up there in the daylit maze of the streets.
Later on, it had been a dream of theirs to work the act on the trains for memory's sake, but not only was it illegal, they had already learned that people could assimilate the Bear outdoors but would go into shock in enclosed spaces. In his maturity, the Bear only took the Coltrane, and sometimes the East St. Louis Toodle-00.
For a while, though, there had been the Bearmobile, one of the ultimate late-fifties tailfin cars, a three-tone Chrysler New Yorker St. Regis— charcoal-grey roof, cream at midlevel, and beneath the chrome streak a slant of deep Bordeaux—that had a push-button transmission, PRNDL, and went a couple hundred yards to the gallon. But didn't the thing purr! It purred like a dinosaur mated to a boiler factory. And weren't they going to have fun in it! That was in the days of the Bear's relative adolescence, when the two of them, Jones and the Bear, were going to go out there and really fuck the world's head up. Let us go down there and confound their language! Babble babble babble, y'all! Behold, the Unconditioned is upon you! There had also been some talk about bupng a motorcycle and a sidecar and riding around the city at night in comic-book costumes, shouting out surrealist slogans and heaving the occasional red balloon fall of ink at a major building. Oh yeah, they were gonna knock a few kinks in the local version of reality. They were gonna build a whole new wing on the brick shithouse of the quotidian. Deal with it, Horatio! In any case they had certainly laughed a lot in those days. They had rolled around the floor of the apartment, shrieking and holding on to their ribs— Jones had actually dislocated his rib cage once, but the Bear had been able to perform the adjustment—hilarious with the sense that they held the whole world's liberating and intoxicant secret in the antic cup of their lives.
Well, the Bear had always thought it a sign of small character to cringe at the fooling and excesses of your youth. Let it go, let it be what it was and God bless its pointed httle head.
What had happened, mostly, was that the last of Jones' family money ran out and they found out they had to make a living. And they got on with the show, like no business I know. The Bearmobile? After some terminal black cough from beneath its enormous hood, they had taken the plates off and left it abandoned on a sidestreet.
In the early days of his imprisonment there had been bright lights and drugs and electrodes, the loss of all sense of time, and a paranoid's paradise of faces
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drifting before him in a cloud, leaning individually in at him out of the unclarity, fading, going, gone, then roarin
g back with indecipherable demands. There had been a terrible period in which some combination of the things they were doing to him scored a direct hit on his capacity for language and thought, and he felt those faculties in him bob and weave, then fall to their knees in the middle of the ring, and his heavy tongue struggling for Hberty and speech.
Wwwwwwwwwwwww, he remembered saying repeatedly.
Remembered trying to locate a memory in the appropriate room in the house of himself and finding the room explicitly, exactly gone. And not just memory either. It went the same for specific components of his sense of self and its contents: words, music, love, ideas, friendly faces, identity, the whole medulla, he meant megillah. Sometimes he clung to the sight of Iris as if to a prayer, but most of the time he couldn't even manage that.
Wwwwwwwwwwwww.
So much for the secret and intricate effort of generations that had carried him to this degree of individuation and speech. They were taking him all the way down. He could identify tracts of his root nature going blank. He had a few bracing out-of-body intermezzos—stars and lights and colors, and a little extratemporal relaxation in the lesser garden—but the general sense was that of the slow intent progress of calm and comprehensive horror. As he lost more and more cognitive ability, the rubric of Stalin's face in some way became the mnemonic of what was happening to him. He saw the pitted cheeks, the yellow eyes, the big moustache. In any case one picture, whatever its weight in words, was all he had left to put a name to what was happening to him.
Wwwwwwwwwwwww.
He had managed a decent wisecrack or two on occasion. Table, chair, electrode, labcoat, nice tie you got there, Hermes? See? I can name things fast as Adam, I got opposable thumbs, a good eye for silk— of course you're scared shitless! C'n you loosen my neck restraint? As above, so below. Adam's apple. Nylon. Brogan. Knee. Nice break in those trousers there. I'm telling you, God's had it with you guys and he's sending in replacements. Oh shit, here we go again. Wwwwwwwww.
What's your name? had been one of the major questions.
I'm just trying to make my report to the members of the Academy.
What's your name?
Just the Bear, he'd finally said.
Not enough. What is it really?
Kukla.
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They rejected it.
Would you believe King Pleasure, he said, and they didn't even zap him for it.
Sackerson, he said once, and saw one old lined face on the perimeter do a take in response, as if it had caught the reference, the famous bear who had been baited outside the walls of the Globe Theater in Shakespeare's day. Sackerson, fierce and bleeding, had held off many packs of dogs before going down for the count. Once, that name had been passed like a talisman among the members of the Bear's worldflung family. Now, for die Bear, this last mention of Sackerson had been no more than a farewell triumph of in-joke wit. It was not a very crowded theater.
Because mostly all he could manage was Wwwwwwwwwwwww.
He didn't know at which point he became aware of disputation in the phantasmal ranks of his attendants, but it must have been going on awhile in his virtual absence. In one of the first modica of clarity he recognized a face from among the earlier apparitions, an old man's face about as gnarled and wrought and Hned and carved as an old man's face could be, an ugly face that when first he had seen it he had thought looked like a devil's but which now, as it leaned down to him out of the fog, had come to seem rather pleasantly ugly. "I sink I haf gotten zem to relent awhile," this face had said to him in a remarkably deep voice and a thick German accent. "Vee vill see vat vee can do."
Ich habe genug, the Bear had wanted to say, in preference to Vee haf vays of making you talk, but it came out some variation of Wwwwwwwwww.
"I know." The ugly man patted him on the shoulder and checked the straps on his wrists for signs of chafing. "There is help."
Friedmann.
As the machines receded and the drugs mostly went away, Friedmann came into focus and was a friend, but wouldn't phone Jones for him. Couldn't, he said—too dangerous still—but the man had a cot and a table and a chair dragged into the adjoining cell and would go into it and converse with the Bear from behind the bars. It wasn't long before Friedmann's German accent began to seem less thick to the Bear, and his heavy ugly face a map of the most pleasant country he could afford to live in just now. Being old, the doctor would lie down on his back after a stretch of talk or a lunchtime sandwich, fold his hands across his paunch, and take stertorous afternoon naps, from which the Bear was careful not to disturb him. Then, after awhile, Friedmann spent a night or two sleeping in the next-door cell.
Be careful, the Bear told him, they don't lock the door on you one day.
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I know the story, grunted the good doctor, scratching at his skull through stray white wires of hair.
They had both read the story, and fell into long conversations about Chekhov, whom of course they both loved. But one must be careful of loving him sentimentally, they agreed. Although it would not surprise the dead author, he would not like it if you did.
Yes yes, thought the Bear, how civiUzed this is. But the conversation was almost infinitely fatiguing to him all the same.
Friedmann was mostly retired and wholly a widower. He had outlasted his wife by more years than he wanted to know about, and his two major heart attacks had not succeeded in reuniting them. He commanded a medley of medical disciplines but had specialized professionally as a neurologist and a counselor; he preferred the word to "analyst," certainly preferred it to the invidious "shrink."
It had taken the Bear awhile to shuck off the suspicion that Friedmann had moved in next door as a management shill and that his name was bait, a fake.
"I like to talk vith you. I like you personally and you bring back many childhood dreams und memories."
"Of course," said the Bear.
"The animals. I always van ted to befriend them."
"Sure."
"Zey were—excuse me I still have such trouble with ze dipdthssong—zey were my bruzzers."
"Yes. On the other hand," said the Bear, "and subjective sentimentaUty apart, the aboriginal population of Hokkaido, having observed that bears hibernate for the winter, decided it would be cool to drag a bear out of his cave and sacrifice it so that Spring would come again that year. They would bind its limbs and cut its throat open with a sharpened stone."
"You vish to express somesing about missology?"
The Bear smiled at the good if unintended pun but let it go. "I wish to suggest that if you do anything the least bit unusual or interesting in this world, people will figure out a way to catch and kill you for it."
"Ah," said Friedmann, and took the indicated pause. "It's a kindness for you to let me stay here," he resumed. "I have so Httle else to do. Most of my friends und colleagues, todt, dead, all of them. Meine frau ist gestorben. It is impossible to have an intelligent conversation with my neighbors. Look at my face. How will I die?"
The Bear examined Friedmann's face, its harsh-cut lines, the redness, the weight. "Heart attack," he said. "Maybe a stroke." n
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"It vill be the heart. I have no especial wish to die soon, but vhen the next one comes I vant one big punch and that I go out hke a hght."
They paused, paying respect to death and its presence in them both.
"Speaking of being dead," the Bear asked, "what's my situation here now exactly?"
"Vhat I hope has happent is you have fallen down an administrative hole. Lost papers, a forgetful computer. I may have helped vith this a little. The idyots didn't know vhat they vanted to do with you ectually. Maybe somevon elsewhere is dichesting data. But I think, and let us hope, that for the most part you haf been forgotten. It is best so. This is best of possible vorlds for the moment."
"Yeah but do monads have windows?"
"Interesting question. Shall ve discuss?"
"No,
" said the Bear.
As it happened, Friedmann and the Bear had the experience of music between them, although this didn't come out in conversation right away.
"You know, when I first saw you I thought you looked like the devil," said the Bear after some time had passed, unknowingly providing the prompt.
"I know vot my face is," said the doctor.
"By now I like your face," the Bear assured him.
"It is qvite a map, and the face of the devil, absolutely. When I was young it was quite striking however."
"So you were a handsome devil then," the Bear suggested.
"Never handsome, but as it happens a success vith ladies, alzo in fact I debuted in a starring role at the opera playing the devil himself. At the Vienna Staatsoper. No? Volksoper mind you. Staats''
"I'm impressed."
"In the title role of Boito's Mefistofele, I had a chest problem finished with the month before—pleurisy, a small valking pneumonia—but my physician has assured me I was veil enough and could sing. So: I strode onto stage in a long machestic robe, in a starring bass role at last, and began the first aria, you know the Ave Signof, Perdone se il me gergo si lascia im po^ da tergo?"
"No."
"Vhen I got to the // dio piccin delta piccina terra^^ his deep voice boomed the notes, '^ogar tragligna ed derra e, alpardi guido saltellante, a casa spangefa gli asti al naso^ the little God of the little world, you understand—he expresses his contempt for Man—sticks his nose in the stars and flowers. At this point I suffered a massive arterial hemorrhage and blood poured from my mouse exactly as if from a hydrant. On stage! Some debut! Unprecedented I befieve