by Rafi Zabor
"I don't get this at all," the guy was saying now, and ran a troubled hand through his thick dark hair, "but I think for some reason ..."
Here Iris got to her feet, her eyes wide and this energy coming off her. Her arms were stretched rigid now, held down and slightly away from her body, the fingers out straight and vibrating, her eyes going wider. It was almost, thought Jones, a Bride of Frankenstein effect, just before the scream. In fact her voice wasn't loud, but you would have sworn she was shouting it was so intense: "Say it say it say it."
Now the guy stood up too. It was all very weird. Jones tried to get up, but he had to take it easy because of the stitches and the incision, and it was hard for him to get a grip on the IV pole. The thing kept trying to roll away from him, and he fell back into the chair twice.
"Go ahead and say it," Iris said, only this time more quietly, her voice almost normal, her tone not that of a plea anymore but one of confirmation.
Tim was finally able to get it together, but his shoulders slumped in what looked and felt like defeat: "I think it's about a bear."
134 Rafi Zabor
To Iris and Jones and Tim it seemed, in a mix of fugues and unisons and as if in a dream state they had somehow all three of them begun to share, that Iris' flushing, tremulous energy was expanding to include all of their reactions to it: Iris seized and shaken by something larger than she really wanted to know about; Jones, the last of his sense of accident swept aside, realizing how far he'd had to fall toward death in order to retrieve the Bear and that, regardless of whatever coincidence had aided or intervened in the process, an Intentionality had driven him there and had now completed its circuit; and Tim unwillingly feeling the structure of his savvy, cautious Hfe collapsing like a dynamited tenement to leave him in the middle of some dispulverated fucking ruin, man, and an unnerving cloud of unknowable dust rising on all sides around him to obscure whatever hip weary humorous view he had once had of things. The quite palpable waves radiating from Iris had some odd optical properties toward the edge of their sphere of consequence, odd quivers of green and violet that began to wobble and blur at the horizon, so that, a few days later, when the Bear stood up from his iron cot, wobbling slightly from the effects of a recent increase of medication in his oatmeal and additionally confused by the unexpected multicolor vibrations mysteriously latent in the air, to see Lester Bowie standing at the door of his cell in a labcoat, swinging a mock-casual stethoscope and saying, ''Klaatu harada nikto, baby," the Bear had to ask the trumpeter to give him a minute, please, in which to work things out. He took in Roscoe Mitchell's bored, perfect impersonation of an ambulance attendant and Malachi Favors' extravagant, even slightly campy male-nurse impression, but thought that Jones looked a httle pekid and unwell in his paramedical whites and Iris' small, perfect features seemed a mite preposterous under a nurse's outsized triangular cap. He was also surprised to see Tim, his eyes going every whichway and his forehead sweaty, coming forward with the keyring while Friedmann, leaning heavily on a cane today and his face red with stress or effort, looked nervously back up the corridor. And who was the hard-looking Irish number with the moustache in the rent-a-cop outfit? The optics of the prison flickering again like a video picture and his own uncomfortable sense of being in too many times or places at once dizzied him, and he wanted a minute's peace and quiet to think it through. It seemed to him, in this complicated instant, that his term of imprisonment was best understood if contemplated in the form of an eye. Read from left to right, this eye showed pink underflesh and a tear duct at its beginning, then opened onto a larger plane shared by pure contemplative whiteness and a beautiful blue-grey mottled iris detailing the emphases and nuances of particular cognitions and events; but at its center this articulated whorl emptied into a paradoxically jet-black locus of uncompromised sight
The Bear Comes Home 135
into which he had fallen with no sense that he was ever coming out. After this iris-and-pupil combo, the eyeform symmetrically narrowed to its other end, which, the Bear understood, he had finally reached. There was no tear duct on that end. Now he was able to appreciate the eye's shapeliness and beauty of line, the loveliness of its surrounding lashes, its sly, allusive, cognitive gleam. As if in acknowledgment, he saw this eye blink once, then open wide again, and in the clarity of sight it afforded him, the prison did not need to stoop to the coarseness of visible flicker to stand revealed as an immaterial construction. The jangle of lock and key was mere ceremony, with a tag of late-comic fumbling delay for Tim and Lester, and when the Bear stepped out of his cell, forgetting his saxophone—Bowie collected it, shaking his head and wagging a finger—into a semicircle of familiar, welcoming faces, as if at a birthday party, his lapse supine onto the gurney was more ceremony indicating his fundamental incapacity while Roscoe Mitchell, looking deadpan, taped a fake IV patch onto his arm and Iris raised the bottle with trembling hands. At the last blockade, a difficulty in which papers flurried and Iris made an ameliorative, improbable but ultimately efficacious speech in the face of uniforms and the organized farce of force, it seemed to him that they were already outside together in the lemon light of early spring, that a fireshening breeze blew upon their faces and that the year's first pale green leaves were putting on a special show for them on a series of slender extended branches. After a time they would ride the Health Department van that Tim had appropriated through old connections at the Brooklyn morgue down preter-naturally detailed streets of actual escape and oh-man-I-don't-believe-we-made-it sighs of relief but for now, in this intermission, these first branches just outside the jail knew the dance and all the local airs, and the old brick wall against which the leaves displayed themselves was beautiful, as were all things the fight lay itself so mercifully upon, and it seemed to him that he, Jones, Iris and the rest of them were already fi*ee to walk anywhere that pleased them, on this day or any other, in what had always been a freely given expanse of world enough and plenty, plenty time.
pai*
..L
On man ^s heaven's influence works not so, But that it first imprints the air, So soul into the soul may flow, Though it to body first repair. . . .
To our bodies turn we then, that so Weak men on love revealed may look. Lovers mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.
-Donne
(
mmmntffti* said the Bear. Which, it occurred to him, was essentially Wwwww inverted.
"Get out of my kitchen," Iris told him, and raised her spatula. She was sauteeing young flat spinach leaves, pousses d'epinard she called them, in a shiny steel skillet, but with her gesture she seemed momentarily to assume the air of a goddess protecting the lovely uncooked side of salmon lying on the countertop beside the stove.
"You're not gonna cook the whole piece, are you? You're leaving some for me raw, right?"
Iris lowered her spatula and affected a patient, long-suffering tone. "I'm broiling the two pieces I cut off the large end. See them? The rest is for you, if you can really eat that much,"
"I'm a big guy"
"You're an expensive proposition."
"You don't know the half of it," said the Bear. He leaned sideways in the doorframe, and without quite realizing it began to hum the opening bars of "What's That Smell Like Fish, Mama."
Iris, always a good listener, caught it and shot him a dark look. "You're impossible."
"Improbable," the Bear told her. "Unhkely, perhaps. Difficult to adjust to in confined spaces. But impossible, no, that's just not me. As Abraham used to say to God at crucial moments. Here I am."
"Can you please wait outside while I'm cooking? Isn't there something you could do for the next few minutes?"
"I like to watch you."
140 Rafi Zabor
"You can watch me when we eat."
"I've never seen you in an apron before."
"For the moment," said Iris, "please please please wait in the living room. There's a bottle of wine breathing on the dinner table."
"
Sounds Hke a monster movie."
"This is a monster movie. Go into the living room and have a glass of wine."
"You're trying to civilize me, aincha. I been there before."
"No you haven't. Git. And will Jones be here for dinner or is he coming over after?"
"After, I think. Who knows? Save him a piece of salmon just in case."
"Whenever he comes, please remember to ask him if he thinks it's safe for you to move back into the apartment with him yet."
"Wha?" asked the Bear—sounding, it seemed even to himself, almost perfectly stupid.
"You don't really expect to stay here forever, do you?"
"Actually," said the Bear, and placed an uneasy hand on his stomach. "Actually. . ."
Actually something was happening down there in his innards. Actually an instability had put in a bid for manifestation. Actually a rift was being riven in his fundamentals.
"Actually," said the Bear, "I gotta go." And he hotfooted it out of the kitchen, pushed open the bathroom door, got his pants down, and made it onto the seat before Richter had a chance to play even the smallest arpeggio of his famous scale.
Well, it was to be expected, he thought.
He'd spent the first four or five days since the jailbreak in and out of sleep, leaving Iris' spare bedroom only to use the toilet or eat whatever was easiest to lay his paw on—by the second day, once the tests on the blood she'd drawn from him with a big syringe had come back from the lab, she'd put a pot of sumptuous oxtail stew out for him along with the antibiotics, and small bottle upon bottle of mineral supplements—before drifting back to sleep, or someplace partway there, where waking life and dreams were more inextricably conflated than usual. He had conversations with his jailers, he introduced the Doc to Iris and engaged in long philosophical dialogues with an unusually articulate section of a large stone wall. Iris tended to wander in and out of these dreamstates; he knew that she was looking after him while he slept, and he felt that his weakness in her presence was both embarrassing and delicious, was some strange indulgence she or the world had allowed him for the moment, some secret buried psychic thing that undid and pleased him
The Bear Comes Home 141
both. He distrusted this all-permissive feeling but surrendered to it nonetheless, and not just because he was too weak and drugfucked to do otherwise. A certain sort-of-out-of-body voluptuousness drew him in, and he drifted with the waves and currents of its indeterminate wake and sleep, floating where it took him, sometimes going under and drowning down to deeper levels, more primordial flows, or rising to primary light. Occasionally he dreamt of his mother, from whom he had been separated young.
As for Jones, thought the Bear as he sat waiting for Iris to finish making dinner, shifting on this seat that had been made, like most of this world's items, too narrow for his comfort, tonight would be the first time he'd be seeing him since the jailbreak, and that had been a pretty blurry day. They'd hardly had a chance to talk then, the day so full of rush and the fear that it would all come down on them next minute if they didn't get a move on. It would be good to see the man again, although in fact the Bear had a bone or two to pick with his buddy. A bubble of rage rose in his belly at a few things Jones had done or let be done while he was inside. The title of the record, for one thing. How could he have let them do that?
The Bear felt other currents shift within him.We're moving earth. We're moving on.
When he was done, he hitched up the outsized khaki pants Iris had insisted he wear around the place and checked his face in the bathroom mirror before reentering the general population. He wetted his paws and worked a rudimentary part into the middle of his headfur, finished off combing it with bared claws, then swished his snout out with some fairly acrid blue mouthwash that Iris had lying around. I've always believed in creating a good impression. He pulled the bathroom door open and stood on the threshold. "Ho-ney," he called out as melodiously as he could manage. "I'm ho-ome."
"Dinner's ready," came Iris' simpler voice in answer amid a clatter of ovenware.
Should I be wearing a jacket? he wondered. She'd picked up an old brown tweed monstrosity from Jones a couple of days back. The Bear smoothed his chestfur, looked down at his feet and wiggled his toeclaws on the parquet. Tic toe tic. Spacetime continuum. Ursina Commedia.
How presentable was I ever? He decided that dinner tonight would be come-as-you-are, but wished he might have a splash of cologne. Must get Jones to come by with my bottle of Tuscany. Goes so well with my native musk. Oh go in already.
"Hi there," he said as he advanced upon Iris and the dinner table.
"Hi yourself," she said, looking up, and favored him with a smile.
Iris was arranging the scalloped white plates on the oval walnut table
142 Rafi Zabor
beneath the brass-and-parchment Hghting fixture, whose three small bulbs she had turned down to medium-dim on the dial. On the table, two candles burned in voluted silver sconces and an open bottle of Bordeaux sat on a woven straw widget to one side of the place settings.
"Star Eyes," said the Bear. He loved the way Bird had played the tune of that name, and it had always been one of his nicknames for Iris and it still fit, her eyes so large and bright. The Bear was sadly aware that for all the failed noble substance inside him, his eyes remained, as they had since the end of adolescence, small, piglike and dull.
Iris turned a brilliant embarrassed smile in his direction, blushed, poor baby, and invited him to sit down. The apron gone, she wore a simple black dress with a wide neckline that tied at each shoulder to just expose her lovely collarbones. To the Bear she looked heartbreakingly easy on the eyes. If those eyes could be trusted, she wore no bra beneath the dress. Even so, he returned his attention to her face. It seemed to him that he could look at her with increasing interest through the years, the decades, let's face it, more or less forever. This is who I am. This is the best of all I know on earth. Is it really all I need to know?
She was not, the Bear understood, in the first blush of her beauty. The rounded cheekbones had begun to assume a new prominence, the eyes had widened slightly and seemed startled by their own light, the brow had gained character and lines—but good Lord if you have any eye for the poignancy of time, she's more expressive than ever, and her music that much more deeply felt.
"Everything's ready," she said.
"You do everything so well."
"We'll see."
"Probably we will."
The Bear sat down.
The Bear had always expected the possessors of beaut^ to understand the meanings of the treasure whose improbable wealth they manifested and over which they stood guard. He had expected, ever since he had first fallen in love with the human form, beautiful women not to be dumb and bimbo-tesque, as local legend had it, but on the contrary^ to be wiser than anyone else in view. This he knew to be an offshoot of his subjective inexperience and therefore mere romance, although in Iris' case he was sure that it was really so: how she looked was the index of the otherwase inexpressible delicacy of her inmore soul, the merest sign of who she was and what, in the wide and ordered ampHtude of the universe, she might finally represent. Her lightly aging looks were a window on more enduring felicities and vistas still.
The Bear Comes Home 143
I haven't changed at all, thought the Bear. Prison, spiritual annihilation, almost death: what the fuck, I endure, and my hurdy-gurdy heart grinds out the same old tunes. How come? And what if I'm getting tired of the music? Can you show me something better? Still, why did the charade of identity, even as it was being freshly reinvigorated by new desire, seem so fatiguing to him tonight? Maybe while he ground out the same old song he didn't quite beUeve in it anymore. Or maybe it was not the tune but the instrument he no longer trusted.
"You look lovely," he said, consenting anyway to the rules of the game.
"A book by its cover," she said. "Let's eat." A deflection.
"Shall I pour the wine?"
"Please."
It was a St. Emilion, soft Merlot to lay against anything acerbic in the fish. Nice choice. Although . . .
. . . Although the most prominent presence at the table, like Christ at Emmaus only more garish, was still the sexual tension between them. The Bear felt as if the table should be moving slightly, or might wobble into the air as if at a spiritualist's seance, lifted by waves of suppressed energy and sensual heat. But all that happened wa^ that Iris raised her goblet of red wine and smiled at him. The Bear raised his own in answer.
"Freedom," said the Bear.
"Health."
"Beauty."
"You."
For all the Bear knew, the sex thing was a one-sided hallucination, and Iris' participation a pigment of his imagination entirely.
"It smells nice," said the Bear of the wine, "but I can't really fit the glass around my snout. Don't you have one of those wider ones?"
"Did I put out the Bordeaux glasses?" Iris asked him in apparent innocence. "Excuse me. I'll get you one of those 'wider ones' right away. They're Burgundy glasses actually."
The Bear sat alone at the table for the duration of her errand, feeling obscurely humiliated. She's so slick. No she's not. Yes she is. I can't read her. I can't tell.
"There."
"Thank you." He made the transfer. He tasted. "Lovely wine."
"Let's eat."
"What a good idea."
The grilled filets of salmon lay on beds of spinach leaves, and were topped by lightly cooked tomato meat and shallot or was it purple onion. The Bear found this simple combination exquisite, and the teacup dome of lightly