Bears Discover Fire

stopped.

“Ready?”

“Ready.” A part of me was scared; another part of me was amazed at how impatient a third part of me was to die.

We were rolled forward again, feet first, into the cold, slightly acrid air of the chamber. A door closed behind my head. Before I had time to panic, Sorel’s fingers found mine and comforted them, opening them like petals, and there was the sting. My heart stopped, like a TV that has been turned off.

Or on. For there came a kaleidoscope of colors, through which I arose, faster and faster. There was no floating, no looking back, no basking in the lattice of light; for no sooner had I seen—no, glimpsed—the familiar splendors of LAD space than they were gone and we were in that other darkness.

The Other Side.

It stretched around us endless and yet enclosing. The “sky” was low like a coffin lid. Sorel and I moved stiffly, drifting, no longer spirit but all flesh. I was dead awake. I was conscious of her buttocks, the flesh on her arms which was fluted somehow like toadstool skin; the cold insect smell as we circled the stone pillars that pinned the low sky down.

We seemed to get no closer as we circled “The Pens” (as I was to call them in a painting): they spun slowly in the center of our immobility, like a system of stone stars. Again someone, some Other, waited inside. Under the lattice of light there was no sense of time’s passage, perhaps because the spirit (unlike the body) moved at time’s exact speed; but here, on the Other Side, time no longer buoyed us in its stream. There was no movement. Every forever was inside another forever, and the moments were no longer a stream but a pond: concentric circles that went nowhere.

There were other differences. In LAD space I had known, even dead, that I was alive. Here I knew that I was dead. That even alive, I was dead: that I had always been dead. That this was the reality into which all else flowed, from which nothing came. That this was the end of things.

My terror never diminished, nor did it grow: a still panic filled every cell of my body like uncirculating blood.

Yet I was unmoved; I watched myself suffer as dispassionately as a boy watches a bug burn.

Sorel was dead-white. She was somehow closer to the pens and when she reached out the stone was right there.

She turned toward me and her face was blank, a gaze of bone. Mine back at her was the same; our nothingness was complete. We were at the standing stones and through them I could see a figure. He (it was a he) beckoned and Sorel passed through the stones, but I pulled back: then I, too, touched the stone (colder than cold) and I was with her again.

We were inside the pens and now there were three of us, and it was as if there had always been. We were following Noroguchi (it was surely he) into a sort of dark water, which grew deeper. It was I who stopped; it took all my will. I turned away and this time Sorel, her face bone-blank, turned away with me.

I woke up in darkness, the blind darkness of the world.

I touched the lid of our coffin. It was porcelain, smooth and cold. I felt Sorel’s hand locked in mine in the steel grip of the dead. I felt not panic but peace.

There was a shock, then another shock, and darkness came over the darkness, and all was still.

“We made contact,” I heard Sorel’s voice say. I was glad. Wasn’t I?

I was on the gurney. I sat up. My hands were burning; my fingertips were on fire.

“The pain is just the blood coming back around,” said DeCandyle. “You were inserted into LAD space for over four hours.”

It was unusual for him to volunteer a duration. And there was no click. I knew he was lying.

“I’ll take him home,” Sorel said. Her voice sounded tinny and far away, as when we were dying. “I can still drive.”

It was morning. Dawn may not “come up like thunder” as Kipling put it, but it does have a sound. I rolled down the Honda’s window and bathed in the cold air, letting the new day cover over the night’s horror like a fresh coat of paint.

But the horror kept bleeding back through.

“We were gone all night,” I said.

Sorel laughed. “Try two nights,” she said. It was the first time I had heard her laugh. She seemed happy.

She pulled up in my drive but left the engine running. I reached over and turned the key off. “I’ll come in if you want me to,” she said. “You’ll have to help me in the door.”

I did. She could hop on one leg okay. Under her nylon NASA-style jumpsuit I was surprised to find smooth silk underwear with lace through the crotch; I could tell by my fingertips that it was white. One leg was puffy like a sausage. Her skin was tight and cool.

“Sorel,” I said. I couldn’t call her Emma. “Are you trying to bring him back or go with him?”

“There’s no coming back,” she said. “No body to come back to.” She pressed my hand to the stumps of her fingers, then to her cold lips, then between her cold thighs.

“Then stay here with me,” I said.

We fumbled for each other, our lips and fingers numb. “Don’t take my bra all the way off,” she said. She pulled one cup down and her nipple was cold and sticky and sweet. Too sweet. “It’s too late,” she said.

“Then take me with you,” I said.

That was the end of our last conversation.

“Sort of a Stonehenge,” my ex said when she came by on Thursday with some microwavables. She was shuffling through my paintings again. “And what’s this? My God, Ray. Porn is one thing; this is, this is—”

“I told you, they’re images from dreams.”

“That makes it even worse. I hope you’re not going to show these to anybody. It’s against the law. And what’s that smell?”

“Smell?”

“Like something died. Maybe a raccoon or something. I’m going to send William over to check under the studio.”

“Who’s William?”

“You know perfectly well who William is,” she said.

Saturday night I was awakened by a banging on the studio door.

“DeCandyle, it’s two in the morning,” I said. “I’m not supposed to see you till Monday anyway.”

“I need you now,” he said, “or there won’t be a Monday.” I got into the Honda with him; even when he was hurrying he drove too slowly. “I can’t get Emma to retrocute. She’s been in LAD space for over four days now. This is the longest she’s ever gone. The home tissue is starting to deteriorate. Excessive signs of morbidity.”

She’s dead, I thought. This guy just can’t say it.

“I let her go too often,” he said. “I left her inserted too long. Too deep. But she insisted; she’s been like a woman obsessed.”

“Step on it or we’ll get hit from behind,” I said. I didn’t want to hear any more. I turned up the radio and we listened to Carmina Burana, an opera about a bunch of monks singing their way to Hell.

It seemed appropriate.

DeCandyle helped me up onto the gurney and I felt the body beside me, swollen and stiff. I quickly got used to the smell. Tentatively, with a feeling of fear, I slipped my hand into the handbasket.

Her hand in the glove felt soft, like old cheese. Her fingers, for the first time, didn’t seek mine but lay passive.