The Third Bear

  "You just need to see. Please? For a friend?"

  He gave me a contemptuous look, but said, "I'll meet you tonight. But I won't go down there with you. We meet there and leave separately."

  "Thank you Lucius. Thank you so much."

  I was so desperately grateful. I had been living with this secret in my head for almost a week. I hadn't been bathing. I hadn't been eating. When I did sleep, I dreamt of snow-white hands reaching for me from the sea. Hundreds of them, melting into the water.

  I no longer think of my parents' bungalow as a trap. It's more of a solace - all of their things surround me. I can almost conjure them up from the smells alone. There is so much history here, of so many good things.

  From the window, I can see the old man now. He seems restless, searching. Once or twice, he looked like he might come to the door, but he retreated and walked back onto the beach.

  If I did talk to him, I don't know where I'd begin my story. I don't know if I'd wait for him to tell his or if mine would come out all in a mad rush, and there he'd be, still on the welcome mat, looking at this crazy old man, knowing he'd made a mistake.

  Lucius at the water's edge that night. Lucius bent over in a crouch, staring at the miracle, the atrocity my lantern's light had brought to both of us. Lucius making a sound like a crow's harsh caw.

  "It's like the movement of a starfish arm after you cut it off," he said. "It's no different from any corpse that flinches under the knife. Muscle memory."

  "She's coming back to life," I said.

  Lucius stood, walked over to me, and slapped me hard across the face. I reeled back, fell to one knee by the water's edge. It hurt worse than anything but the look in the woman's eyes.

  Lucius leaned down to hiss in my ear: "This is an abomination. A mistake. You must let it go - into the sea. Or burn it. Or both. You must get rid of this, do you understand? For both of our sakes. And if you don't, I will come back down here and do it for you. Another thing: we're no longer friends. That can no longer be. I do not know you anymore." And, more softly: "You must understand. You must. This cannot be."

  I nodded but I could not look at him. In that one whisper, my whole world had collapsed and been reformed. Lucius had been my best friend, but I hadn't been his. He was leaving me to my fate.

  As I stood, I felt utterly alone. All I had left was the woman.

  I looked out at her, so unbelievably beautiful floating atop the sargassum.

  "I don't even know your name," I said to her. "Not even that."

  Lucius was staring at me, but I ignored him and after a time he went away.

  The woman's smile remained, as enigmatic as ever. Even now, I can see that smile, the line of her mouth reflected in everything around me - in the lip of a sea shell, or transferred to a child walking along the shore, or leaping into the sky in the form of a gull's silhouette.

  Maybe things would have been different had I been close to any instructors, but outside of class, I never talked to them. I could not imagine going up to one of those dusty fossils, half-embalmed, and blurting out the details of my desperate and angst-ridden situation. How could they possibly relate? Nor did I feel as if I could go to my parents for help; that had not been an option in my mind for years.

  Worst of all, I had never realized until Lucius began to avoid me that he had been my link to my few other friends. Now that Lucius had cast me adrift, no one wanted to talk to me. And, in truth, I was not good company. I don't know if I can convey the estrangement surrounding those days after I took Lucius to see her. I wandered through my classes like an amnesiac, speaking only when spoken to, staring out into nothing and nowhere. Unable to truly comprehend what was happening to me.

  And every night: down to the sea, each time the ache in my heart telling me that what I believed, what I hoped, must have happened and she would be truly alive.

  In that absence, in that solitary place I now occupied, I realized, slowly and with a mixture of fear and an odd satisfaction, that my interest in the woman's resurrection no longer came from hubris or scientific fascination. Instead it came from love. I was in love with a dead woman, and that alone began to break me down. For now I grieved for that which I had never had, to speculate on a life never lived, so that every time I saw that she had been taken from me, a part of my imagined life seemed to recede into the horizon.

  "The arm grew stronger even as she did not," I would tell my fellow castaway, both our beards gray and encrusted with barnacles and dangling crabs. I'm sure I would have practically had to kidnap him to get him into the bungalow, but once there I'd convince him to stay.

  Over a cup of tea in the living room I'd say this as he looked at me, incredulous.

  "Something in the magic I'd used," I'd say. "There was a dim glow to the arm. It even seemed to shimmer, an icy green. So I had succeeded, don't you see? I'd succeeded as well as I was ever going to. Magic might be almost utterly gone from the world now, but it still had a toehold when we were both young. Surely you remember, Lucius?"

  In the clear morning light, the old man would say, "My name isn't Lucius and I think you've gone mad."

  And he might be right.

  Ultimately, my love led to my decision, not any fear of discovery. I couldn't bear the ache anymore. If she no longer existed, that ache would be gone. Foolish boys know no better. Everything is physical to them. But that ache is still here in my heart.

  It was a clear night. I stole a boat from the docks and rowed my way to the hidden cove. She was there, of course, unchanged. I had with me jars of oil.

  I had a hard time getting her from the bed of sargassum into the boat. I remember being surprised at her weight as I held her in my arms in the water for a time and cried into her hair, her hand caressing the back of my head.

  After she was in the boat, I took it out to where the currents would bring it to deep water. I poured the oil all over her body. I lit the match. I stared into those amazing eyes one last time, then tossed the match onto the oil as I jumped into the sea. Behind me, I heard the whoosh of air and felt a rush of heat as flames engulfed the rowboat. I swam to shore without looking back. If I had looked back, I would have turned around, swum out to the burning boat, and let myself be immolated beside her.

  As I staggered out of the water, I felt relief mixed with the sadness. It was over with. I felt I had saved myself from something I did not quite understand.

  "What happened then," old man Lucius would say, intent on my story, forgetting the thread of his own.

  "For three days, everything returned to a kind of normal," I'd tell him. "Or as normal as it could be. I slept. I went out with a couple of the first-years who didn't know you had abandoned me. I felt calm as a waveless sea."

  "Calm? After all of that?"

  "Perhaps I was in shock. I don't know."

  "What happened after the third day?"

  My guest would have to ask this, if I didn't tell him right away.

  "What happened after the third day? Nothing much. The animated right arm of a dead woman climbed up the side of my building and crawled in through the window."

  And with that, Lucius would be frozen in time, cup cantilevered toward his mouth, shock suffusing his face like honey crystals melting in tea.

  I woke up with the arm beside me in bed. I tried to scream, but the hand closed gently over my mouth. The skin was smooth but smelled of brine. With an effort of will, I got up, pulled the arm away, and threw it back onto the bed. It lay there, twitching. There was sand under its fingernails.

  I began to laugh. It was after midnight. I was alone in my room with a reanimated, disembodied arm.

  Her arm. Her hand.

  It had come to me from the depths of the sea, crawling across the sea floor like some odd creature in an old book.

  What would you have done? I remembered Lucius' comment that the arm displayed the same mindless motion as a wounded starfish.

  I took the arm downstairs and buried it in the backyard, weighed down with bricks an
d string like an unwanted kitten. Then I went back to bed, unable to sleep, living with a constant sense of terror the next day.

  The next night, the arm was in my room again, last remnant of my lost love.

  I buried it three more nights. It came back. I tossed it into the sea. It came back. I became more creative. I mixed the arm in with the offal behind a butcher's shop, holding my nose against the stench. It came back, smeared with blood and grease. I slipped it into an artist's bag at a coffee shop. It came back, mottled with vermillion and umber paint. I tried to cut it to pieces with a bone saw. It reconstituted itself. I tried to burn it, but, of course, it would not burn.

  Eventually, I came to see it meant me no harm. Not really. Whatever magic bound it, it did not seek revenge. I hadn't killed the woman. I just hadn't brought her fully back to life. In return she hadn't come fully back to me.

  "So then you kept it locked in a box in your room, you say?"

  "Yes," I would tell my shadow. "There was no real danger of discovery - no one came to visit me anymore. And I rarely went to classes. I was searching for answers, for a way out. You have to understand, I was in an altered state by then."

  "Of course."

  A sip of tea and no inclination to divulge his own secrets.

  The sea beyond the window is the source of the biggest changes for me now. It goes from calm to stormy in minutes. The color of it, the tone of the waves, varies by the hour. Over the months, it brings me different things: the debris of a sunken ship, a flotilla of jellyfish, and, of course, strands of sargassum washed up from the bay.

  "I was insane," I tell him.

  "Of course you were. With grief."

  Youth is a kind of insanity. It robs you of experience, of perspective, of history. Without those, you are adrift.

  Back to the libraries I went, and back again and again. But it was as if the floors had been swept and I could not trace my own footprints. In those echoing halls, I found every book but the one that would have helped me. Had my long-ago counterpart, standing there deliberating, thought about stealing the book? No matter now, but I found myself reliving the moment when I had slid the tome back into the stacks rather than hiding it in my satchel with at first horror and then resignation.

  I even visited the remnants of the mage's college, following the ancient right wing of the library until it dissolved into the even more crumbling walls of that venerable institution. All I found there was a ruined amphitheater erupting in sedgeweeds, with a couple dozen students at the bottom, dressed in black robes. They were being lectured at by a man so old he seemed part of the eroded stones on which he sat. If magic still remained in the world, it did not exist in this place.

  All I had left were the more modern texts and the memory of a phrase among the signs and symbols I had used to animate the arm: "Make what you bring back your own."

  Each time I took the arm out of the box, it came garlanded with thoughts I did not want but could not make go away. Each time, I unraveled a little more. Dream and reality blended like one of my parents' more potent concoctions. Day became night and night became day with startling rapidity. I had hallucinations in which giant flowers became giant hands. I had visions of arms reaching from a turbulent, bloody sea. I had nightmares of wrists coated with downy hair and mold.

  I stopped bathing entirely. I wore the same clothes for weeks. Her skin's briny taste filled my mouth no matter what cup I drank from. Her eyes stared from every corner.

  "What did you do then?" my guest would prod once again. He'd have finished his tea by now and he would be wanting to leave, but ask despite himself.

  "Don't you know, Lucius?" I'd reply. "Don't you remember?"

  "Tell me anyway," he'd say, to humor the other crazy old man.

  "One night, sick with weariness, with heartache, I took the arm to the medical school's operating theater and performed surgery on myself."

  A rapid intake of breath. "You did?"

  "No, of course not. You can't perform that kind of surgery on yourself. Impossible. Besides, the operating theater has students and doctors in it day and night. You can't sneak into an operating theater the way you sneak into a cadaver room. Too many living people to see you."

  "Oh," he'd say, and lapse into silence.

  Maybe that's all I'd be willing to tell my Lucius surrogate. Maybe that's the end of the story for him.

  One night, sick with weariness, with heartache, I took the arm to the medical school's operating theater and performed surgery on myself.

  It wasn't the operating theater and I wasn't alone. No, my friend was with me the whole time.

  Me, tossing the proverbial pebbles from some romantic play at the window of Lucius' new apartment one desperate, sleepless night. Hissing as loud as I could: "Lucius! I know you're in there!"

  More pebbles, more hissing, and then he, finally, reluctantly, opening the window. In the light pouring out, I could see a woman behind him, blonde and young, clutching a bedsheet.

  Lucius stared down at me as if I were an anonymous beggar.

  "Come down, Lucius," I said. "Just for a moment."

  It was a rich neighborhood, not where one typically finds starving medical students. Not the kind of street where any resident wants a scene.

  "What do you want?" he hissed down at me.

  "Just come down. I won't leave until you do."

  Again, that measured stare. Suddenly I was afraid.

  He scowled and closed the window, but a minute later he stood in the shadow of the doorway with me, his hair disheveled, his eyes slits. He reeked of beer.

  "You look half-dead," he said. "Do you need money? Will that make you go away?"

  Even a few days earlier that would have hurt me.

  "I need you to come down to the medical school."

  "Not in a million years. We're done. We're through."

  I took the arm out of my satchel and unwrapped it from the gauze in which it writhed.

  Lucius backed away, against the door, as I proffered it to him. He put out his hand to push it away, thought better of that.

  "She came back to me. I burned the body, but the arm came back."

  "My god, what were you thinking? Put it away. Now."

  I carefully rewrapped it, put it back in the satchel. The point had been made.

  "So you'll help me?"

  "No. Take that abomination and leave now."

  He turned to open the door.

  I said: "I need your help. If you don't help, I'll go to the medical school board, show them the arm, and tell them your role in this." There was a wound in me because of Lucius. Part of me wanted to hurt him. Badly.

  Lucius stopped with his hand on the doorknob, his back to me. I knew he was searching furiously for an escape.

  "You can help me or you can kill me, Lucius," I said, "but I'm not going away."

  Finally, his shoulders slumped and he stared out into the night.

  "I'll help, all right? I'll help. But if you ever come here again after this,

  He didn't need to say it. I knew exactly what he was capable of.

  My parents had a hard life. I didn't see this usually, but at times I would catch hints of it. Preservation was a taxing combination of intuition, experimentation, and magic. It wasn't just the physical cost - my mother's wrists aching from hundreds of hours of grinding the pestle in the mortar, my father's back throbbing from hauling buckets out of the boat nearly every day. The late hours, the dead-end ideas that resulted in nothing they could sell. The stress of going out in a cockleshell of a boat in seas that could grow sullen and rough in minutes.

  No, preservation came with a greater cost than that. My parents aged faster than normal - well-preserved, of course, even healthy, perhaps, but the wrinkles gathered more quickly on their faces, as did the age spots I thought were acid blotches and that they tried to disguise or hide. None of this was normal, although I could not know it at the time. I had no other parents to compare them to or examine as closely.

  O
nce, I remember hearing their voices in the kitchen. Something in their tone made me walk close enough to listen, but not close enough to be seen.

  You must slow down," she said to him.

  "I can't. So many want so much."

  "Then let them want. Let them go without."

  "Maybe it's an addiction. Giving them what they want." "I want you with me, my dear, not down in the basement of the Preservation Guild waiting for a resurrection that will never come."

  "I'll try...I'll be better..."

  "...Look at my hands..."

  "...I love your hands..."

  "...so dry, so old..."

  "They're the hands of someone who works for a living."

  "Works too hard."

  "I'll try. I'll try."

  III.

  I'll try. I'll try. To tell the rest of the story. To make it to the end. Some moments are more difficult than others, and you never know which are which until it's too late.

  When Lucius discovered what I planned to do, he called me crazy. He called me reckless and insane. I just stood there and let him pace and curse at me. It hardly mattered. I was resolute in my decision.

  "Lucius," I said. "You can make this hard or you can make this easy. You can make it last longer or you can make it short."

  "I wish I'd never known you," he said to me. "I wish I'd never introduced you to my friends."

  In the end, my calm won him over. Knowing what I had to do, the nervousness had left me. I had reached a state so beyond that of normal human existence, so beyond what even Lucius could imagine, that I had achieved perfect clarity. I can't explain it any other way. The doubt, in that moment, had fallen from me.

  "So you'll do it?" I asked again.

  "Let's get on with it," Lucius growled, through gritted teeth, "But not at the operating theater. That's madness. There's a place outside the city. A house my father owns. You'll wait for me there. I'll get the tools and supplies I need from the school."