by Rafi Zabor
But think. He had world enough and time. It didn't matter that much where he was, not for a day or two at least.
Though as he reminded himself when he was better adjusted to the idea, in late afternoon, the sunlight going golden and declining, that he would be spending the night out, you did have to be careful.
There was no bear season in these parts, thank God and the game commission—though who knew what an individual sportsman with a hard-on and a .30-06 might do on the spur of the moment?—but you had to keep clean out of the forest in deer season at least. Anything brown and moving, even a rambling jazz musician, was fair game then. And even at the best of times there could be problems. His rump twanged in memory.
Once, when he was a young bear, just fullgrown, he'd been on a ramble round these woods and had felt a sudden sting in his rear, heard the sound, clocked the scent of man, looked back at himself and seen the dart quivering on his ham, a fan of bright synthetic feathers in its end. He was out cold in two minutes and woke up with a big orange radio collar clamped around his neck and the mother and father of all hangovers driving garbage trucks through his brain and body end on end in a long procession. As for the collar.
The Bear Comes Home 235
he couldn't get the thing off even after his head and hmbs had cleared of trank. It was bolted together, welded on or something. He took off just in case they were coming back for him with a truck or a copter—there weren't supposed to be any Kodiak-looking brown bears in these woods no matter how relatively small in scale he was for the breed, only American blacks, whatever their color phase. They might decide to put his ass in a sling and, in what later became the time-honored phrase between him and Jones, fly his ass to Manitoba. VVTiere he would be in deep shit, a city bear in rough terrain and no pocket change for a phonecall home. It was also possible the ranger or researcher who had put the collar on him had noticed his anomalous forepaw structure and would want to pull him in for a closer look in electrode city.
So he'd been lucky to wake up before anyone got back. He'd backtracked to where Jones was waiting for him up a dirt road in the Bearmobile smoking a Lucky and reading Raymond Chandler. After Jones finished laughing at how the Bear looked in a radio collar—and it took him an awfully long time to get over it—with the help of a few basic tools from the trunk they got the goddamn misbegotten hellborn contraption off his neck. The Bear had wanted to leave the thing there, but Jones got one of his best ideas ever, and the sequel to the Bear's radio-banding was his little masterpiece.
Instead of leaving the collar in the woods, wouldn't it be a kick, said Jones, if whoever was monitoring it—from a satellite they hoped but a ground-level tracking station would do—found it heading south to the city on the Thruway at a steady sixty miles an hour, stopping once for gas and a couple of times at the tollbooths to pay up? It tolls for thee, motherfucker, they laughed at the presumptive researcher—this bear must have learned to drive! Jones and the Bear motored south, Jones cackling as he punched the pushbutton tranny, and the Bear got under his blanket when they hit the booths.
WTien they reached town the Bear wanted to drop the collar in a dump-ster, but here Jones exceeded himself, exceeded both of them in his probably finest hour: once the Bear was upstairs in the apartment slugging a beer down and laying the plates out for dinner, Jones flagged down a passing taxi on First Avenue and rode it uptown to Thirty-fourth Street. Veiled by the city's usual loud diversions and a cloud of his own cigarette smoke, he managed to pull up the backseat cushion and stuff the radio collar inside, got it right down there in the springs and jammed the cushion back into place without the driver noticing the move.
Imagine it! They laughed themselves silly in the apartment that night, Monk and Mingus records on in the background, later a little Ornette Coleman. Some nimrod in a radio satelHte tracking station is watching a bear cruise midtown Manhattan—down Second and up Third had been Jones'
236 Rafi Zabor
own preferred route in his hacking days, pick 'em up at the movies, take 'em to a restaurant, then tool 'em home to fuck each other silly while he, Jones, wheeled around solo till like four in the morning—this certifiable bear! cruising into the wee small hours and holing up to sleep in a Brooklyn garage— Jones had noted the cab company's address on the door—till about sundown the next day.
What the everloving fuck were they gonna make of that}
Howls and cackles. Dreams of youth. Those were the days my friend.
Trout.
It was nearing sunset when he saw them, about a foot and a half deep in a creeklet that fed somewhere downstream into Beaver Creek or the Esopus and hence a sure way home, two young troutlets holding still in running water, biding their time in the lee of a big round stone, their noses pointed into the current. To tell the truth the Bear was getting kind of hungry, but he paused a moment just to watch them. They wavered, coasting, under the eddy of the submerged dinosaur-egg of rock that was going green with algae despite the relative swiftness of the flow and—the Bear tested it downstream of the trout so as not to freak them—the bonechill cold of the water, which argued an underground source not far upstream. Incredibly cold. Look at the fishes. That was what you did if you were a fish, found a spot out of the eternal strugglesome tide pouring do^^l from the peaks or fresh out the granite belly of the earth, and when no more urgent business was pressing you pointed your nose into what remained of its power, flexing your tail left and right in a measured wave to stay in place, keeping yourself upright with countless skilled adjustments of your sidefins, pulsing the water in and out your gills and probably drifting into an alpha state, meditating the Tao according to your capacity and the nature of the particular river you woke up and found yourself in that day.
These two fish were about nine inches each, in any case less than a foot long, not mature, and despite the Bear's insistent hunger, sharpening for the moment into an urgent intestinal pang, it seemed a shame and a trifle unsporting to ... he tried it anyway.
So that when the Bear plunged his right forepaw in, claws cruelly exposed, that qualm of conscience was probably why he missed, too much contemplation and the compassion for all beings that necessarily followed from it, that and a basic sense of fairness: after all they were hardly grown— and the fish spun away in a quick improvisation of panic, breaking water over a shelf of tilted slate, splashed upstream through some rocks they hadn't expected to encounter, caught up with each other in a deeper pool whose wide round surface was troubled only Hghtly by a few calm ripples of
The Bear Comes Home 237
overthought, where they turned in tight circles to talk about their near-death experience awhile and then began to settle in. Their pool was a fool's paradise but the Bear did not pursue them thither. Thither? Fuck it, he thought. I can spend one night in the woods sleeping bent over the belly of my appetite and not die of it. Hunger was an edge, in other circumstances, he had known how to live with, even profit from.
Then he saw it, farther into the stream than the spot in which the trout had spent their afternoon, a big grey boulder breasting the current and three feet beyond it another of its kind bulging up between white lips of foam that kissed and sucked its body. Between these two stones the water quickened as its passage narrowed, then poured triangulating through the gap, foaming into itself as it met the wave of its own reception, rushing into its own lap, and the Bear settled himself—sharp intake of breath as the full cold hit him— into the spot, hefting his arms over the backs of the two big rocks as if they made a natural armchair, and let the waterflow strike his neck from behind and spill over the breakers of his shoulders. Cold. Holy fuck it was cold. Yes, this stuff definitely came at you from somewhere down under.
He could imagine—or the latent iciness of the flow gradually communicated the image bit by bit to his bonemarrow—he could imagine the water braiding itself onward through primordial rock mile after mile of subterranean dark, brilliantly cold, thrusting for release, full of the hunger for destiny
or at least fuller self-expression in daylight.
Water, I'm with you, thought the Bear.
Water, although I'm no longer capable of such singleminded earnestness, I can dig it.
This is the life, he thought. Everything strictly on the natch. Screw the recording studios. Discard the saxophone—well maybe—and later for every assimilationist impulse I ever gave way to. Life, pure and simple. Water, flow.
Damn, but you are cold. What drives you? What powers your engines and replenishments? How do you manage to just keep coming on? How come you are so inexhaustible? Me, I need a rest.
It dazed his brain after awhile, the incredible earth-borne cold of it. It dizzied him and he let it. It was inevitable, he supposed, in this near-mineral submission to the force of purely natural things, that he began to think of Iris—when would she be back?—and doubly inevitable, once he got that far, that he remember their lovemaking, every image he could summon up of the long enduring sweetness of it, each occurrent along the flesh-and-bone continuance of her beauty, the startling glimpses of her cool soul behind the trembling veil of the moment's heat; and although, lying there with the water pouring over him in his granite armchair and his body submerged, he did not
238 Rafi Zabor
get a fall erection, after awhile a clear thick gum of pre-ejaculate fluid began to purge itself from him into the water, of which it seemed some essential superconcentration or quintessence, anyhow certainly kin. Good Lord, he thought, he'd never felt anything like this remotely. There must be something abased in it, he felt so voluptuous and strange. He felt himself in some essential sexual congress with not just the stream but the trees leaning perilously over it as the concave earthbank eroded around their roots, and with the forest beyond, and not just the forest beyond but with the blue sky above him and the light cumulus of thought that had begun to gather in the open mind of its expanse.
He was getting really amazingly dizzy in this onflowing unbelievable coldness, and left the water when his head was so dazed by its frigidity he started slipping into dreams in which Iris merged with every possible natural form and shimmered upward into the sun or the other celestial lights . . . actually what got him moving was the stoned, improbable thought that he could drop his head and drown here, not notice it and wake up in another world, his hfework unfinished, his essential impulse unsatisfied. It was not a day for interrupted flow. Once he hauled himself out of the hypnotic weave, the threaded threnum of the water, and shook himself dry on the bank, he had to sit on a big stone streamside for at least ten minutes until his brain began to unwobble, and then there was nothing he could do but lie down on his back in the smaller stones and fall asleep unprotected from all the world, beside the purHng stream.
He woke an indeterminable time later feeling . . . what? Not refreshed or renewed, nor any word that came to mind, but something, if too subde for grasping, akin to every word that came to mind. Jeez, he was still stoned, and on nothing stronger than pure cold water.
He walked upstream minutes later along the pigeon-egg stones of the embankment, then cut inland and uphill into the forest. He was still hungry but it didn't matter.
Night began to fall, if fall is what night did. He found a grove of trees he liked and felt the air going cool after the sun's descent. His sense of smell sharpened.
All he would have to do tomorrow morning was follow the stream down to its last embrace in larger water or look for a well-tended dirt road—a gasoline trace did in fact float upon the air—that would lead him to macadam and inevitably home. But, he thought, why trouble yourself about the morrow? Why not, you rather emboiirgeoise furball, spend the night out here and enjoy the experience to the fiill? Tomorrow will see to itself and bury its own dead without you.
The Bear Comes Home 239
As it darkened, the sky turning itself a number of impermissible shades of magenta then purple then blue silk, the Bear loved the way the trees columned around him. He had never managed so constant an upward aspiration as they. He had therefore wandered among the lesser lights, looking here and there for any trace of radiance.
He placed his back against a stout member of this thickbarked community, and decided, as the air precipitously cooled, that this was better than denning up in some cave, not to mention a lot more macho.
Sweet calm feeling as he quieted and night came on in full. He remembered an image from some Sufi poet or other, probably Rumi, since Rumi was the only Sufi poet he had read very thoroughly, and thought that, for all the attractions of the dimming scenery—thank you, it's lovely—to turn your attention on phenomena and their dance is to fix not even on the waves of the ocean but on mere bubble and froth, while beneath them moves depth upon depth through which life sifts itself up and down through varying levels of light and a continuing infinity of configurations, unseizable by either imagination or mind—even desire has better purchase than those. What he wanted was to unconfine the revelation ft-om its specifics. The only way he knew was through immersion in beauty, as sheer as he could stand it. But his mind led him ineluctably back to form, just now to the one form he most loved and had selected, unfairly and according to his hungers, fi-om all others. Iris.
Was such love true expression or only more captivity?
Still, he thought, feeling the rough tree against his back while watching the sky go dark, it's silly to narrow one's eye and finick out distinctions. To squiny up and say this but not that, that but not this. That isn't how the music goes.
As thoughts blurred into image, and wakefulness into the first waves of sleep, he saw a crowd of people lined up shoulder to shoulder in a room, eyes squeezed shut, hats pulled down over their ears.
So silly. WTiat a dumbass way of going about things.
The night had turned surprisingly chilly, but of course he was wearing fur.
His head dipped. He slept.
And woke once, quietly, barely a tremor between the states of sleep and wake, and decided to move his act to another tree at the edge of the clearing over there and walked to it. Looking up when he got there he saw the stars again, long time no sea, glittering in depths of indigo sky.
Decades walking the house of this body, this world, they're enormous.
In the dark I find my hat, high and filled with stars.
I walk into my name as if into open sea.
240 Rafi Zabor
Well, sorta. Not yet.
He woke and slept several times to see, in stages, his patch of heaven's central piece of drama: the horned moon pulling three bright planets east to west across the sky on a length of string.
With hardly a ripple to mark his descent he slept again.
The next few times he woke he thought—simple, clear, unmuddied by the music of desire—thought of Iris and said, to whoever might be asking or listening, yes.
In the waiting room at ^Megaton Records, up on the twenty-fourth floor, Jones had a classic view of midtown Manhattan outside the tinted glass window-wall, the office buildings sharply defined in clear sunlight against a blank blue sky. Since xMegaton was offset west of center, Manhattan's ranked commercial massiveness was placed at a satisfactory distance and in coherent perspective, so that Jones was able with relative ease to rehearse his old adolescent image of the lined-up slabs, worked through by offices as blue cheese is by mold, collapsing under the weight of their own unreality, toppling into each other like the domino theory, and the whole construct going down in a wonderful upflung cloud of dust—^Moloch returning to primal matter in good grace. Jones was not, nor had he ever been, a monster: no one died in this catastrophe; in fact there was a general feeling of release. There were celebrations in the street.
Then Jones remembered that this old image of his had been appropriated recently by a TV ad for an investment company housed in the one computer-generated building that didn't fall; in fact, after a slight wobble on impact, it held the others up.
Well, 'ts'as better thus. Jones meant no harm. Never had. Not enough to count anyway. And since
now he was seeking entry to that world and its stacks of commerce, maybe he should give the imagery a rest.
Stylish, untroubled-looking people walked past him, tall women with square shoulders, high breasts, slim waists, power hair and eyes bright with certainty. The men—everyone seemed so young and tall—had haircuts and wore expensive clothes casually or cheap clean clothes that looked expensive on them. Clothes never seemed to hang very well upon the rack of Jones. In fact, uncomfortable on the sofa, looking up at a lot of hip linen and broadcloth going past, Jones was the only man in view constricted by a jacket and a tie, recent things Sybil had bought him on spec from Paul Stuart—a flash of her plastic and they were his. The guys and gals strolling by
The Bear Comes Home 241
had brisk walks, breezy talk, and looked as if they worked out or at least jogged a lot.
In truth Jones preferred the artistic life. It was almost a shame the Bear wasn't dancing in the street for a living anymore.
Feeling more than fashionably thin, Jones sank into the cushions of the sofa, but they were hard and didn't give much. If he had been there on the Bear's behalf he could have handled all these antiquated perceptions of inferiority^ and alienation smoothly enough, but he was looking for a job for himself this time, and it made him feel weak and guilty and out of place. Just like in the good old days. Maybe big bands would come back too.