The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  112 Rati Zabor

  and possibly not eqvalled since! From that time on I sang onh' in the chorus. I vas already a medical student and that decided the choice of career." He shrugged. "Possibly it was better so. Poi con ttnert fatuha superhafa il su triUo mil ^erha^ he sang. ^^Botioso puhe! Traa/tato atomar

  "Maybe you shouldn't have debuted as the devil."

  "Perhaps not."

  "Because it was not your nature."

  "Really who knows my nature? You?"

  Whether doctor or devil in Menna, Friedmann had seen the storm coming—*7cwish both sides of famih^ but assimilated, totalh" assimilated, so foolish we were"—assembled parents, %Tfe. son. dau^ter and as much of the silver and memorabilia as could be carried, se* ed je* els into coat linings and had crossed the ocean to America well before the downpour of Hider and the war. Haphazard professional circumstance on this side of the water, and many people to support, accounted for the sometimes miscellaneous nature of his practice. ~I am ti'o, three specialists. Realh' I am interested, alzo I am too old to assimilate organically the new disciplines and technology, in molecular neurology brain chemistry especially as regards aspects of evolution. Somesing of a reputation but too late now to accomplish something vundamental in the field."

  "^Aha," said the Bear, enlightened as to the source of Friedmann's presence there, initially and now.

  "Ifes," the doctor said, and leaned intently towards him: "So.^ You are s|>e-daL Do you have special information?"

  "What exacth" do x>u want to know?"

  "What you know."

  "Fm not a medical bear."

  "Then tell me anysing, so long as is honest. You have opposable sumbs, elongated toe und finger structures in forepaws."

  "Also an altered palate."

  "To say nothing of your brain."

  "The less said about my brain at this point the better. Look where it has got me. Also, if nothing happens to me here I should live much longer than your usual run of bear."

  "A himian lifespan?" Friedmann wondered. "So much?"

  "Some of my ancestors," said the Bear, holding the information back, "lived a good deal longer than you might think."

  This seemed to move Friedmann in some odd way "Are you prophetic? Do you know somesing of the future?"

  Oh Lord, thought the Bear. The difficulty of converse betv^een disciplines. "Are jwii hip to all the secrets oiyour construction?" he asked.

  The Bear Comes Home 113

  "No," Friedmann admitted.

  "Can I play you some music?"

  "I don't like yatz. In music I vant streams, mountains, blue skies, not more of city life. I have too much of this already."

  "I can understand that. But can I play a little and then talk to you? As if I were a little drunk. As if I still felt something. Let a little something happen, could be."

  Friedmann sighed heavily.

  "Maybe you could ask me another kind of question," the Bear suggested.

  Friedmann's face deepened and his eyes got suddenly intent. "Is there anuzzer life? After, I mean." The question was not scientific but personal.

  "Before, after, during: yes."

  "You know this."

  "Yes."

  Friedmann took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with a clean white handkerchief. "You know this personally, from experience."

  "What I find strange," the Bear told him, deciding to be a lot less guarded on the subject than usual, "is not the fact that there is an overarching transcendent realm, but that in the breadth and generosity of the universe as it really is, there is room for such narrowness and constriction as this." He gestured around him at the walls and bars and paint in the limited light. "And the fact that I've generated enough anguish to wind up stuck inside it, when it's illusion top to bottom—what can I tell you, I'm ashamed. It's such a failure of taste."

  Friedmann sighed heavily, shrugged, then let his shoulders slump. "Ja, things are tough all over," he said.

  The Bear had known that music was a dead or at least differently animated thing in him at the Tin Palace before his bust, while playing the long ballad—an odd, doubled moment in which his creativity seemed to have been enlarged and eliminated simultaneously; so much so that the bust had seemed an afterthought, the gross materialization of a prior event and no more. Now, in his all too material cell, with his proper brain and motor functions more or less restored to him after the episode of pure monstrosity, he didn't know what music was to him anymore. Once the fogs and cobwebs were sufficiently cleared from his working consciousness, although an ambient fog of drugs still interposed itself, a veil—they were still dosing his insufficient supply of food—he worked the keys of his horn and bent to the instrument, sitting on the edge of his iron-frame bed. Scales, a few preparatory maneuvers and some fretting over the short supply of reeds and minor

  114 Rafi Zabor

  damage to the instrument, then, out of some sense of the wryly appropriate, the head of Bird's "Relaxin' at Camarillo," Bud's "Un Poco Loco," and although he didn't remember all of its fractures, xMingus' frantic "Lock 'em Up," also known as "Helhdew of Bellevue." Truth was he didn't much feel like pla}ing. Truth was he felt like an intruder on this terrain or someone impersonating himself, making the moves and noises he might have made if he were still alive and in love with his locus of manifestation and the music that might be found there, latent.

  Other repertoire: Lady Sings the Blues. Xutt}^ Justice. Evidence. Criss Cross. Moanin'. Fables of Faubus. Alabama. A Question of Sanity. I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say. Hellhound on My Trail. How Much Is That Doggie in the Window. Que Sera Sera. Kryptonite. Doxy. Lush Life. Glass Enclosure. So WTiat.

  It would have been hard to play even if he felt hke it. It was damp in here, his one reed was about shot, its fraying edge felt horrible on his tongue, he didn't have a swab to clean his horn out with, a few pads were working loose, the springs were probably rusting, and one of the rods had gotten bent when they tossed the horn after him into the Black Maria.

  As he went further into it through the days he didn't bother to count, in a time during which it partway occurred to him that Friedmann and the slowly emergent friendly keeper Tim might be more destructive than any outright tormentor—since being savaged by a dead sheep, or by two of them, robs one of all the dignit}^ of righteous outraged response—and as he began to find the thing in him that long ago had seized on music and learned to work it into an instrument of his secret self, it sometimes seemed that what was monstrous about him in this world or any other was not his sizable bearform and his impolitic gift of speech but this apparent talent for music, this powerful equipage that he had always prized above all his other contents: that fine instrumentality that played itself into intelligible shapes of sound and knew what lay ahead uncharted in the seas of time, and could fashion forms that lived their way into the obscurities of that future and thereby lit them: it seemed hideous to him now. Monstrous, to use the proper word. Following the force behind this perception led him logically to agree that he belonged in some sort of prison after all.

  The Bear was turning inward, dropping Hke a stone down the well of himself in the dark: not a sound: hadn't reached water yet. Neither was he caroming back and forth between the walls. Straight down, then, into what he hoped was the mothering dark, stars reflected on the face of the water. All his previous solitudes had been masks that this deeper one had worn. Either this was some scary but authentic repenetration of himself, from which

  The Bear Comes Home 115

  renewal eventually might come, or it was the most banal and pointless solo game that external circumstance and interior error could wring from him. It was impossible to tell, but he was making the descent will-he nill-he nonetheless.

  If this is only more emotion, thought the Bear, the hell with it. Depression gets you nowhere. What I want is extinction, effacement, death.

  As he went down the shaft his own smell came back to him and he did not hke it, he foimd it ugly and unfamiliar
. Plummet, then, and don't censor what you make out in the dimness. The music thing: he didn't like the blank intent look in its eyes and he could feel the greed churning out delusion and ambition at its heart. It had closed his eyes to the love of everything that did not serve it—Jones, Iris, whatever and whoever in the breathing piping world, without exception, that did not feed its maw. The music beast fed, it seemed to him, on a rich stew of denial and whatever local greenery could be torn from its roots and chomped down whole. It pitched its tent on one small field and saw the rest of the wide world's landscape as pointless waste. From the rough look of the canvas, the armaments stacked around the perimeter and the forms standing guard around the fire, it had pitched this tent for war. So: his beautiful talent was an ugly thing at heart, and if it came across authentic beauty in its march, it soiled whatever trace was resident there with its own smudge, trod the music into the mud and marched on hungry and destructive as before.

  The Bear's self-disgust, at this turn of his contemplation, was so strong that he had to remind himself not to kill the musician, only peel him, if that was still possible, and refine him as far back to the holy as could be managed under the circumstances and sufficient unto the day. Find something in him, if possible, that would not coat itself in the travesty of a self you could put a name to.

  Too much fucking far, he told himself.

  I got lost in it. It's me.

  Imprismed.

  Exit, pursued by a bear.

  If he didn't feel like playing, he didn't much feel like listening to music either. Certainly not to jazz, certainly not to anything he had spoiled with his touch. Mozart maybe. Start with angel Mozart and after awhile of that see what still seemed alive and uncorrupt.

  Friedmann of course loved Mozart. "I could bring you a Valkman," he said, "and cassettes."

  "Headphones have to be pretty much destroyed to fit my head and most of them hurt my inner ear, probably do some damage in there. Do you have a radio?"

  "This I will bring."

  It was a black plastic thing, it stayed in Friedmann's cell because of regulations, and for the most part the Bear used it only to listen to the news: to details of the world he had never paid much mind to because he'd thought that by knowing it in general he had known it well enough. Not true.

  WTien he did begin to feel like noodling at the horn it was to explore the architecture of certain chord changes—checking out the cornices and capitals of the structure, as it were—and this surprised him too. "Chelsea Bridge" showed him how much work there was to do. Although he knew his way around the halls of modern harmony, the Bear had always been an essentially melodic player who liked his harmonic materials simple enough to get out of his way when he wanted them to: he liked the option of an unobstructed field. He'd always seen himself pitched somewhere between Jackie McLean and Ornette Coleman, his tough-talking tone close to Jackie—although the Bear had never tugged his intonation Jackie's trademark bittersweet increment flat—his sense of abandon and free choice nearer to Ornette. Then too, sometimes, a fury with everything that was not the Absolute filled him and his music screamed its quest with a love that must have been something like Coltrane's but which he understood, finally, was the only thing he had that really was his own; and the Bear followed this long-phrased love or rage through the lifts and volutions of its laws, each note he played laying the next stone of the road ahead toward a series of theophanies, forms rising up like prayerful approximations which the Absolute graciously if only provisionally consented to inhabit, then falling away as burning husks before successive revelations and final, epistemological fire.

  All that felt pretty far from him now. He was in no condition to shake the world or its pillars, or even light the most mundane book of its matches, much less seek out, beyond the life and death of ephemeral forms, some ultimate fundamental flame. So he was picking his way through old chord sequences now, as if through bones to see what edible scraps remained. "Sta-blemates." "Lotus Blossom." "Blood Count." Was there anything Billy Strayhorn hadn't said? "All the Things You Ain't." "Reincarnation of a Lovebird" he'd save till later. And it half seemed to him, in the half Hght of his contemplation, that the regular rotation of any given tune's harmonic cycle— which had always seemed a weary round to tread when the free road was there for the taking and the key to the highway always in his hand—represented the spirit's chance to make accommodation with worldly circumstance and learn ft-om it. A humbling thing to be sure but maybe necessary if the whole job of living down here was to be done in full. Anyhow he could hardly be said to have avoided this world and its circumstances now.

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  This was a jail, he feh, that he had built brick by brick during the long anxiety of his emergence into public music—oh yeah, and before that too—in short by a couple hundred errors of perception and judgment and taste: all those misgivings, all that quailing: this is a prison of your own construction, bodied forth in the hidden workshops of your fear. Did I really pull this down from the available pictures? What's the alternative? Put on the red rubber nose and funny hat? The Bear cast a weary eye around the walls and comers of his cell.

  What he had always liked least about himself was the anxiety at the back of his being. No doubt it was by nothing else that he had been betrayed into the materiality of the slammer. So where was the chrismal drop that might save him?

  It was at about this time in his downward progress, the Bear felt, that he began to make some good, monastic, via negativa use of the cell to which circumstance had confined him, and to turn this shut-in shutdown of a winter into something at least potentially restorative. But to think that he was succeeding at something, think that he was getting anywhere at all, was to kill the process dead, if process there was. To even hope for progress raised before him the monstrous egoic form of himself that it now seemed more than ever necessary to slip away from or outright slay, if he was to find sufficient freedom.

  The Bear had never gone in for hibernation, had dismissed it as ancestral old-hat pre-bop, but at the moment something like it, only vastly more internal and dangerous, promised him his only possible scrap of refuge, and since choices were limited, he went further in, or down, whatever.

  Another thing he disliked about this descent was the fact that the light of Iris had been shone upon him immediately before it, as if that were the signifier and love the thing that the world—himself wearing a mask, of course—most denied him; that in his present cell it was the cathedral of love that loomed over his depth of exile. Let love get real and the jailhouse shadows gather, find their form, and here I am, caught in an absence I have myself provoked.

  Is that how it is?

  The Bear didn't know, but he hated the way it looked.

  And music, once his whole grip on life, dead as a doornail and visibly rusting on the concrete floor of his cell.

  Then one day it happened, or maybe happened: what he'd been waiting for, or maybe what he'd been waiting for—it was hard to tell in the dark. In any case something within him gave way and he began to die. That is, the being he had always felt himself to be within his body, that energy, that identity, began to fall away in him for good. He could reach into his body to it, but

  couldn't haul it back into daylight or even shake it by its shoulders. It was going, it was seeping out of him into the earth. Or maybe into the earth, he didn't know where it was going really. It was going somewhere gone.

  So he sat there on the edge of his bunk feehng the life run out of him, but was in no pain. It was unnerving, though. It had happened to him twice before, when he was a sweetsouled visionary cub with a more accepting nature, and it had been unnerving even then. Now, in this cell, without external consolation or support, it was worse, this passing away of what the human world was pleased to call the animal soul. You never knew how much you were losing, or what if anything you might gain in return. This time it took three days and while it was happening he didn't feel like doing or saying much. Good thing Friedm
ann wasn't around. If the Doc had been around, the Bear would have had to talk with him. The process would have gone on regardless, but it was better not to have to talk.

  When the Bear's inward dying played its last fadeaway cadence on the afternoon of the third day and he knew that it was over, he listened, he sent out every subtle emissary of sense to see what new light might befall. When earlier versions of this little death had finished with him, capacities in him had been unleashed and given freedom. Set loose fi-om prior constriction and unknowing, they had been empowered and enlarged. Those gifts and their attendant celebrations, in the end, had been everything he possessed: they'd animated his music, and done the same for him. Without that, zip. Which was what he seemed to be left with now.

  The Bear listened. The Bear sensed his way as far out into the breathing world as he could manage, and no new resonance came back to him; he scented no fresh air, sensed no newly minted light. And peering down into himself, the place was dark and empty still.

  The Bear sat on the edge of his bed and thought, Hm. Inner death and no resurrection. The world was void, the joint deserted.

  Evening fell.

  Hm, he thought, still sitting there, not having moved except to scratch his nose or nuts.

  And that's the world tonight.

  Over, if not quite out.

  The Bear lay down on his bed and thought of music. No help.

  There was one way out. The Bear, no dope, he took it. Slept.

  "I think possibly you are too hard on yourself," said Friedmann, to whom he had confided only his misgivings about music, a few days later. The deeper metaphysics were of course unspeakable, and the name Iris would not pass