In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

2

MEMORY AS MONTHS ALONE: TO live in a world changed by my wife but that did not contain her. In those days I began to miss her differently than I had missed her in the years we shared these rooms with the foundling, and also I came to resent the attitudes of the fingerling, who swam sharp circles around my heart and lungs, rejoicing at my wife’s abandonment, her escape, that easy proof of what unsteady structure our family had been. Sometimes he choked himself into my throat, and it was in those minutes that he held court, that he showed how well he could speak in my voice, if I did not try too hard to resist.

With my mouth, the fingerling said, NOW YOU MUST GO INTO THE DEEP HOUSE.

ROUT YOUR WIFE, he said. LAY WASTE TO MY BROTHER.

CLEAR THIS DIRT OF ALL OTHER CHILDREN, he said, SO THAT I MIGHT BE REVEALED IN THEIR PLACE, SO THAT MY MOTHER MIGHT LOVE ME IN THEIR STEAD.

The fingerling, he said nothing of this to me until it was too late, and then when he did speak he said too much, on and on until I silenced him too, until I stopped his speech with an application of my fists to my stomach or throat, where I sometimes caught his shape beneath my blows, but most often I bruised only myself, marked yellow and blue guesses of where he might have been. It would be some hours before he regained his voice, but then he again spoke clear and calm and sure, uninjured behind my battered skin, and I believed what he said to me was true: My wife would not be coming back from the new house she had sung, that deep house dug below, and as long as she remained away the foundling was not coming back either.

My wife’s moon loomed lower than it had before, its wider hue continuing its shift from yellow-white to pinkish-red, and as it bent the sky it also bent our seasons, so that our short fall preceded an endless dry winter, all gray skies and no snow, no rain. The woods were evergreen and so mostly kept their boughs, but even there some stands of trees lost their needles, then their cover of bark, then some thickness of their trunks, until, hollowed out, they crashed down beneath heavier winds.

In the cold those trees rotted slowly if at all, and one day I realized that the sun no longer rose as regularly as it had but rather kept its course just beneath the edge of the earth, as if it were ever almost-night or barely-morning, and only rarely after did we see its shape arcing overhead, although some measure of its gleam still curved near the horizon, glowed us long dawns, stretched days of dusk.

I continued to trap from the woods, but because I did not eat the meat my trapping created only more digging in the burying ground. I fished until the sunless air grew too cold to venture onto the water as often as I had, and on the coldest days I rested upon the dock and wondered what would happen to my fish, to whatever creature lived below the fish, the bear that was not a bear—but then the salted water did not freeze. The rest of my hours I spent in the house itself, walking not just the ground floor but also warily venturing into the first story of the deep house below, where sometimes I called my wife’s name, or else the foundling’s, and sometimes I did not. As I walked, gas-lamp in hand, the fingerling chattered away, often tinny in my ears, or else he spoke from lower in my body, and from both stations he urged me again to follow my wife downward, to find which of the many rooms and chambers she had entered.

I listened to his urgings, but I was not yet ready, hesitated even after we discovered the secret to my wife’s doors, a banality unsuspected: All were locked with the same lock, the same set of tumblers as the house’s first door, the one that led out onto the porch and the dirt, whose key I wore slung around my neck, as I had always worn it. And so none would refuse my passage, should I choose to enter.

And then one morning I found outside our front door the footprint of the bear, and more of its signs beside: its fallen fur, its spoor. Like all the other animals of the woods, the bear had never before left its shaded domain to walk exposed upon the dirt, and so beside those footprints there shivered around me my own goosed flesh, my prickled hair—for now something had lured it from its woods, and what else was there, what else had changed but the absence of my family, and then I knew that whatever pact the bear and I had enjoyed through the long years of my poaching, that unspoken truce was at last broken.

THE NEXT MORNING I SEWED for myself an armor of furs, a grotesquerie of layers upon layers, of thick skin and rough-nubbled hide, each swath stitched with a crudeness borne of my own fat fingers. I threaded together what we had meant for covering our floors and our walls and our bed, and when I was finished I draped myself tip to toe, then sewed my shape inside, made myself horrible, a beast meant to match the bear. My movements stiffened, thickened, I knelt before our hearth, wetted my fingers, dragged their tips through the cold ashes stilled there, then painted my face with what char stuck to those narrow bones, so that all that showed from within the fur was dark, cheeks and nostrils and ears and lips. Heaving beneath my burden, I tucked my skinning blade into its sheath, its sheath into the belt strained around my waist, and then I walked out the door, off the porch, around the house and into the garden, where sat my waiting traps, each wanting again for the woods.

I put my hands into that pile, and when I saw my hands next they held the only weapon I had ever understood, the only one I had ever wielded against another: not spear or axe, not machete, not bow or sling. Instead, my hands had sought what they knew, and remembered into their grip the largest of my traps, like the others in everything but size, and never before used: on this end a steel jaw, ready to be pried open, set to collapse, and on the other a chain waiting to be wrapped around my wrist and forearm, then sewn deep into the fur of my armor—and then, at the fingerling’s suggestion, stitched deeper, into the arm below, so that no blow might rip it free.

Memory as reminder that I was no hunter, no good tracker: Like a fool, I first marched to the cave, but the bear did not so easily give itself up, and once inside I could not even find the tricky entrance to the lower passages where I assumed it slept.

There was only one method I had employed to cause the bear to appear, and so wearing my thick-layered suit I set my traps again, manipulated their intricate devices to capture what best beasts the woods had left, the widest-antlered bucks, never before caught and as yet undiminished, but soon broken-boned, velvet-robbed; and then another such prize, a well-plumed peacock, whose blooded coverts I twisted free from their roots, weaving their long-quilled eyes through the seams of my armor. For weeks I wore my armor and I stalked the woods and I killed every mink and otter and polecat, bashing their heads where they were caught, lifting the sewn-in trap above my shoulders, crashing it down upon their hissing, their mewing mouths. All these and more I interred beneath the burying ground, my aggression escalated so that I might fill the boneyard dirt with the best dead, so that the bear might be compelled to call them free, their shapes necessary to restock its domain. And all this time I remained stuck within my armor and then stuck to it, its threaded seams and hems leaving no place for me to slip free. For some stretch I ate and slept and pissed and shat within, filled those furs with sweat and filth, staying in the woods until my ash-streaked cheeks were smeared with my frustration and with my disgust at my stink, and surely in this state there could have been no sneaking up on the bear, who even from within the deepest depths of its cave might have smelled my stiff-legged approach, the bloodied, muddied layers of my furs.

The woods, never loud, hushed now at my actions, until at last I woke to a morning where all my traps waited empty and quiet, there being nothing to catch or else nothing so dumb as to approach the bloody steel, the sure paths of stench and sign I left everywhere. Satisfied, I returned to the house once more, to cover myself again in hearth ash, and to wait for nightfall, the better dark within which I hoped to hunt the bear.

FIRST THE WHITE MOON RISING, then the newly red one, both wrongly full night after night and that night too, when beneath their rays I lifted my stiff-stitched and stinking self from off our porch, felt the pull of the trap’s chain upon my skin, and with my loudest voice I called the fingerling to duty.

Soon I arrived at the burying ground to find the floor of that clearing flipped at last, some buried bodies of beavers and badgers and wolverines dug free of their shallow plots, their gore dried or else drying. Everywhere there was the fresh mark of the bear, its footprints wide as my face, urine like acid prickling my nostrils, fallen fur crawling with fistfuls of lice—and at that sight the fingerling squirmed nervous at the back of my mouth. I pressed him back down, and also myself forward, toward the median of that boneyard, toward what meeting awaited me there: the bear rising, unfolding its limbs from their rest, all its massive size matted in the butchery of my trappings.

The fearsome beast of our first meeting was long gone, and instead there was only this new creature, lowed, submissive in posture if not in fact, its previous wound expanded, expounded upon: The bear that stood before me now stomped unsteadily on its meat-thin limbs, its fur-torn, bone-sprung body led wobblingly forward by its squared head, that skull burst through the tearing skin of face and snout. Orbital bone gleamed bright around the jaundiced eyes it was meant to protect, those spheres drooped upon distressed tendon, sleepy on frayed muscle, and my eyes roved mad too, took in all its shape, its stomping stance, its claws flexing free of its threatening paw. Its voice tore from its lungs, the sound of that roar so fierce it stumbled me even before the bear tensed its body forward, ready to lean into the angry first step of its charge—and as it roared again I heard its true voice for the first time, a speech like no other.

Despite this show of confidence, I reckoned well the seeming diminishment of the approaching bear, for hidden inside my own hackle of found fur was the same wearied lack, the same bones carved only brave enough—and then all that remained of me arrived at its test, the bear falling upon me, all hot breath and battle, and now memory again, of conflict reached:

To plan to close the distance between us by striking the first blow.

To drop the trap from my right hand, to catch its falling chain and swing it back overhead with my left.

To watch the heavy trap orbit once, then again, the only revolutions I had the strength for, all the bear’s charge allowed.

To throw my hand forward, the trap escaping my grip to slam its open sharpness into the side of the bear’s opening face, catching its growl between those quick-closing jaws of my own.

To set my feet, to dig the hard heels of my boots into the dirt—the dirt beneath the woods’ thin floor—and then, as the caught bear tried to wheel away, to begin to pull its face down to my level, to the dirt, turning the chain hand over hand, tightening it in my grip, wrapping its length around my forearm.

To hear the fingerling cry out as I dragged the bear, to feel his cheer loosen him from his hard small place, celebrating a victory yet unearned; and in that move he unbound what part of my resolve he had made, even as the bear turned back, as it charged again, as even with my trap undoing its face it closed our slim distance, intending to undo much more of me.

The bear roared, its voice constrained but never caught, and then it stood into that sound, lifting the enormous dark of its body upon its hind legs, and me with it, up from off my own thinner limbs. Its head was now three lengths above the forest floor, my trap still embedded in the crushed flesh and scraped bone of its cheek, and from the other end of the trap’s chain I was left to dangle and kick and also to support my sewn-in arm with the other, trying to reduce the pull of that deadly weight, its tearing free.

My armor came apart beneath every swipe of the bear’s claws, its uselessness made more obvious with each tugging of the bear’s trapped head, each new blow ribboning my flesh beneath. Before long my caught shoulder separated from its socket, muscle and bone pop-popping beneath my skin, and now both the bear and I were howling, our shared frustration loud enough to empty the woods, to drive every still-living thing from that burying ground.

The bear continued to stand, swung and batted and pulled against my caught chain until it damaged not just my body but its own. Inch by inch I fell, my weight dragging the trap down the bear’s muzzle, that sliding steel unbinding some rare part of its still-skinned skull, squeaking metal on bone, scratching a swath of hair from off its face as it worked itself free. My feet kicked for the relief of the ground, but despite my slow falling, the last few inches remained a gap I couldn’t yet close, and as I swung within the bear’s anger, I continued to be caught by its blows, my tattered shirts filling with more and more of my dumb blood. In my shoulder I watched some strained bone at last break through the skin, and when I nearly fainted at the sight and the spilling, then the fingerling inserted himself into the action, keeping me awake, urging my eyes again, commanding me to hang on, to somehow climb the chain with my good hand even as he moved out of my chest and into my trapped shoulder. As he stretched his length up that side of my body, I felt how he worked his own secret skill, making some new connections to bridge muscle to tendon, tendon to bone, and above it all he spun skin to contain what he had repaired, and as I realized what he had done I cried out again, all at once so sore afraid.

MY REBUILT SHOULDER HELD, AND upon its strength I pulled myself up the chain toward the bear’s throat, where I thought to put my skinning blade to right use, but then came some cruder event, the fingerling snapping, or else something snapping in the fingerling, his cries echoing inside mine, their loudest sound escaping my mouth to be mistaken as some fiercer threat. The bear howled at my howls, tossing its head and its shoulders and me too, my body swinging in time with its movements until at last I fell free, the momentum of my bloody weight screeching bone, pulling the trap’s jaw clear of the bear’s snout, the bear’s freedom and mine bought at the cost of most of its nostril, and also a ropy skein of maggoted, loused fur torn from nose to ear.

I faced the untrammeled bear, its open roaring, and what latest bear met my looking, enormous upon its hind legs: I saw for the first time its rows of sore-pocked nipples, four across its chest exposed from thinning fur, nearly choked shut by the bone sprung through the bear’s winter coat, then the lower set, the pair almost hidden behind a furred thickness still untouched by the surrounding decay. The bear waited until it saw I had seen, and then it laid its length upon the forest floor, rolled its body back and forth across the madness of mud our tangle had made, as if the cool earth might soothe the damage I had done its face.

Or rather, not its face, but hers: She whined and whimpered in the agony of her ruined mouth, pressed it hard against the forest floor, biting and tearing at the earth, yellow teeth staining with dark dirt. How little I still knew of the bear then, despite all the other mammals I had trapped and gutted, despite all the others and parts of others I had buried, and all the dusks and dawns I had stood on the dirt side of the tree line, watching her move about the clearing of the burying ground, waiting for her to leave before I made my own approach, some leftover rabbit in my hand, and how wrong I was to believe the bear a he instead of a she—

For now I was sure the foundling was no boy but rather a cub, stolen from this once-sleeping mother, this wooded power who slept no more.

And no wonder the sun could not rise. No wonder winter could not fully come. No wonder in those days it was always the far end of fall, always almost-night, when such a thing could come true, such a thing as the theft of a cub, as a song to make a boy.

All this, because my wife took what was the bear’s to love and loved it herself, because she entreated me to love it as she did.

All this, and still there was also with me my own secret child, the one we made but did not finish, whom I had not revealed, only buried away inside my breast and belly.

I stood up into that fear, into the pain that surrounded it, and on unsteady feet I spoke to the bear.

I said, I know what my wife took from you.

I said, I know you have come to my house looking for what is yours.

I said, The child you seek, I promise it has never been mine. I have not claimed what remains yours to claim, or if I have, it has only been these small beasts buried here, these trifles, of no importance to me.

But never your child, I said. Never that.

To the bear, whining, writhing beneath my words, I said, It was my wife who made your cub her own, who made him no bear at all.

As I spoke—as I waited for the bear to respond—I found I could not lift my right arm, its length still swaddled in deep-sewn chain. The impulses of my brain failed again and again to reach the nerves of that limb, and I saw how that length of my armor was swollen with what I had spilled. I began to fear I would lose the arm, until what else was there to do but make any mistake that might first save me, and still I swear I did it almost without thinking—or else it was only what thoughts floated behind my speech, the speech I spoke to the bear even as my remainder asked the fingerling for his help, asked without knowing if he could—and then the fingerling agreed, too eager, and only once my body thrummed with his process did I keen the cost of our agreement: He knitted my flesh, remade complete what he had begun while I hung from the bear’s grip, but also he took some other part of me with which to do so, as his mother had done to make her moon, forming it not only from song but from some fraction dug from each of us, and for some short time after I would be less whole than before, even past what fractures I already possessed, and with each stitch that pushed the trap-chain from out my skin or reknit my flesh, so some other bound the fingerling tighter to me than ever before.

With my arm again wholed, I set my knife to quickest work, cutting through layers until I had shed my shredded armor, and then I pulled tight the remainder of my undershirt to cover the still-flapping skin of my chest and belly. The bear’s lungs sucked air and breathed blood, so that her teeth specked with the evidence of her deep wounds, but what was there to do for her within my few powers? I was not the healer my wife was, not the shaper of flesh she had somehow become. Softly I stroked the bear’s coat, paining myself not to pull even more fur from her already-unthreaded skin, and then the bear roared, and with her roar she told me what mistake I had made: Until my confession, she had not known where her child went, had thought him dead, his now-furless smell so alien she had not guessed my wife’s son had been that cub so long gone missing, so furiously missed.

THE BEAR DID NOT SPEAK precisely, could not form the mouth-shapes necessary to make the words of our language. I moved to make some response to her roarings—this speech so unlike my own yet somehow translated by the fingerling—but that ghosted son moved first, marshaled his new shapes to possess some smaller set of tools, my tongue numbed as he muscled behind it his own wet weight. As he spoke he swam from my head to my heart to my many other hurts, and then to all of them at once, something he had not before been able to do, and even as I struggled to understand the bear I also feared to know the powers this new ability portended: The fingerling’s securing of my shoulder—and the snapping that had followed—had done him some damage, and now he was not just one shape but many. In each of the wrong and wounded spaces within me, some fingerling came up to call a chorus, to give voice to WHAT NOW, to WHAT NEXT, to WHAT COWARD, WHAT COWARD—and how I tried to ignore him, the many of him there were, and how he expanded everywhere against my shattered nerves, so that I might not.

I followed the bear into the mouth of her cave, where my wife and I had made our temporary home, then we descended after her into the deeper tunnels, where I had searched for my wife after I first saw the bear, when my wife disappeared into the earth for some hours or days. Together we went deeper still, but always along the main path, ignoring the branching side halls and rubbled chambers I saw spiraling away into the dark. In that structure there were no doors, only loose pilings of stones, and through their impermanent barriers I did spy some snatch of what lay there, stolen away: Here one of my traps, there a ripped and discarded skirt my wife had thought well lost.

Soon we arrived in the chamber where I assumed the bear had hibernated, where presumably she had been asleep when we first came to the dirt to build our house—or at least that theory accounted for the long habitation evident in that chamber, with its layers of bedding, of bent and torn bones, near fossils. Here too there were some scraps of fabric, ripped shreds of paper that might have belonged to us, or anyone else like us, and everything in that chamber smelled of the bear—urine and rot and feces, dank and fetid, damp fur and dug dirt and stalest milk—and while I continued to be curious about what I had found, I did not have much longer to look.

The bear placed before me some small bundle of furs, and I needed no imagination to recognize their origins. She unfolded them with her paws, opened them below my slumped body, and then after she retreated I knelt in the space she allowed and gathered the furs into my arms: Here was snout and claws attached to more fur, thick fur lined underneath with fat, all somehow still fresh, ready again to be the makings of a better-made bear than the one before me. The linger of my wife’s perfume remained, proof enough that it was indeed my wife who had song-skinned the bear’s cub, and while the bear watched, I rubbed my fingers down the seams of her cub’s separation, feeling for the places where he had ceased to be a bear, a connection severed as he became a boy, birthed out of this child already alive, already once made flesh from flesh.

The bear roared and then roared again, and in this roar I saw her cave before we came to it: How deep beneath the woods the bear slumbered then, and within her the cub, some drifting egg, some fertilized idea, unplanted.

And in this roar, more worries, that if she was disturbed before her cub was born, then he might not be born at all, or might be born in the wrong place, where he would not survive; that if the coming of her cub did not cause her to stir, then there would be a time when the cub was awake and alone in the cave, vulnerable.

And in this roar, why she put her den so low, why the entrance of her cave was so complicated, the tunnels deeper so distracting, dazing enough that some simpler thief might have lost her way, might have sought instead some easier prize to steal—but not my stubborn wife, not this mother capable only of ghosts, who would one day want more than anything a baby of her own, a baby she might give to me.

And in this roar, how after we came my wife crept downward through the bear’s tunnels, filling her boredom and loneliness with exploration, while on the dirt I toiled with my hands to raise us our house.

And in this roar, how my wife first found the bear, long asleep, long pregnant as my wife would one day wish to be pregnant. And in this roar, how my wife had placed her hands upon the bear’s swelled season, her stomach still full-furred in those days, and how my wife had held her hands there until she felt the four-footed kick of the cub.

And in this roar, what happened next, the first split of the bear’s own fur, the first growth of bone or shell to cut its way out, wounds made by my wife’s songs, by their desperate and varied attempts to slow the bear, to speed my wife’s escape after she was caught.

And in this roar, the too-early labor of the bear caused by the same, her cub loosened by the bear’s chase of my wife, by her premature return to the woods, to the tree line where I saw her for the first time.

And in this roar, how the bear tried to return to sleep, to slow the cub’s coming, how in her dreams she believed it a thing done, and yet how as she slept the cub did come.

But first how her strange pregnancy seemed to take years, the bear thought or else dreamed, and still the cub was born too soon after the bear’s angry pain, her destruction of our cargo, her retreat into the depths: her cub then a tiny thing, unable to care for himself, but with a dozing mother too hurt to nurse him right, unable to do anything but sometimes sing some simplistic bear-song, a lullaby meant to slow his growth until the bear could be made right, well healed enough to mother him.

How one day when the bear awoke, her slowed cub was gone, and she did not know where he had gone.

And then this last roar, all the truth left to tell: The bear told me that the father of her child was a bear. She told me that the father of her child was not a bear. She told me that the father of her child was here. She told me the father was not here. She told me that the father of her child was nowhere, and also everywhere, as long as everywhere did not extend to the other side of the lake, the other side of the mountains, that rich earth where things were less simple than they were upon the dirt or within the woods or beneath the lake, and so perhaps there was even more that was possible, more than she remembered.

Perhaps, she roared or, rather, not the word but what words I heard in the sound: Perhaps, but even if that was so then still that was not the way here. And in her voice I heard something so like the voice of my wife, some similar tone to that with which she had told me how we would make the dirt our own, how with new rules we would shape from it the world we wanted.

The bear woke me from my memories with more of her voice, and then she told me that upon the dirt between the lake and the woods, always there were two that appeared, and always the two made a single child.

She told me that now there were four, and too many children besides, because ours was both boy and cub, and perhaps none of the four was set upon the right place, nothing shaped as it should be shaped, and when she was done telling me this she told me what she thought should be done to put our world to right—what should be done to my wife and to one other—so there might be a right number of each, of male and female, mother and father, parent and child.

With loud and quiet roars, with a variety of vocalizations I had never heard before, a bear-song simpler than our own speech but supple enough for possible truth, she told me that if I would return her cub to her—and if I would also punish my wife for taking him—then she would take care of the other, my own complement I had not yet met, and afterward the numbers would be better balanced, as always they had been intended.

I nodded as I listened, but I knew she was not quite right, for in all her calculations she did not count the fingerling. He was my secret alone, and so long as he was within me, then there was no proper math.

THE BEAR’S CARAPACE SHIVERED, HEAVED. She lowered her shoulders to the ground, then motioned with the wedge of her head that I might climb up. I searched for purchase among her bones, dug out handfuls of fur and slipped flesh before finding promontories on which to make my nervous clenching, and after I was right-straddled atop her the bear leaped out of her chamber, climbing sure and swift into and up and through the deep tunnels to the surface. Outside her cave, the bear charged through the woods, whipped through branch and thorny bramble until my face and arms were scratched and scraped, each new blemish drawing what blood remained, and before I could voice any complaint we were arriving, already back at the burying ground.

There the bear slowed, circled once, then stopped and stood upon her hind legs, raising her half-furred face above her shoulders so that as she ascended I fell from her back, landed hard. Freed of her burden, she remained standing to howl at the moons, which at first continued their slow arc unfazed by what sound she hurled at their shapes, no matter how she carried on.

Frustrated, the bear lowered herself, then stood to howl once more, and this time I thought I saw my wife’s moon shake in its circuit.

And so again I said that I would do as I had been asked, this time in my own voice: I would enter the house, I would seek out my wife, and in the deepness I would convince her to give up the foundling.

OR ELSE TAKE HIM FROM HER, said the fingerling, from out of my mouth, and then again the bear shook its hackles, again it roared until all the woods and my wife’s moon shook around us, and still there came more sound from the bear, more spit-flecked thunder and command, and then from the surrounding graves came that exodus I knew nightly happened but which I had never before seen. As I watched, broken-boned deer and elk and moose pushed forth from the forest floor, and then cougars and muskrat, wolves and coyotes, beavers and squirrels and rabbits and skunks and chipmunks and wild goats and boars, partridge and pheasant and peacock and grouse and all other manners of beast and bird, each called by the bear from whatever shallow place I had buried its shell. I recoiled as they stumble-rushed into the thickets or failed to take flight, for all the wrongs I had done now came past me on all sides, their injuries grotesque, and yet how I would commit the same wrongs again, how I knew I would: The wants that had prompted me to break their bones and beaks, to rip their fur and feathers, to taste their oddest parts, none were resolved, and when I was remade I too might be less than I was.

The bear knocked me flat with the heavy paddle of her paw, then held me against the soft-flipped dirt: With tooth and claw she undressed me until I was naked and then again until I was stripped of my nakedness. My wounds oozed, fed the roots below, and when I was empty of blood I took one more breath and then I was empty of that too, and as I suffered, the bear breathed herself into my unskinned body, filling me with her coughs and her wheezes and also her musk, her wild smell which ever after leaked from my pores.

Within the bear’s heated speech, I heard her melody, like that of my wife’s but simpler, without proper words, and with that sound the bear scabbed each wound, filled each divot with song-made flesh, as my wife might have done to make her foundling. This new body, it was meant to last the long journey ahead, that departing beneath the dirt to which we had agreed, and with its completion the fingerling grew excited from his many perches—and in that moment I became something else, other than what I had been—some not-quite-husband, a dream of the bear, as the bear was perhaps the dream of the woods, of the cave beneath, set in motion toward what she wanted most, toward what I or the fingerling had agreed, a pact without which she would not have rebuilt this body upon my bones: I would enter the deep house, and there I would find my wife and convince her to give up the foundling and also to again skin him as a bear using his right and previous fur, which I would carry with me into the earth. In return we would not be punished for our crimes, neither me nor my wife, and so we might be free to leave the dirt, escape back around the lake, to our fathers’ country over the mountains, or else to some other distant land, like this one but also better emptied.

We would be saved, the bear promised—but if my wife would not give up the foundling, then I was to take him by deception or blood, and then when I returned there would be other rewards, if I chose to remain to receive them.

For this and less I betrayed our marriage, as slim threaded as it then was, and for this I am ashamed, and yet in my defense what can I say but this: Without that betrayal, how else would I have gained the strength to descend into the deep house, to seek the reunion that could only happen within those long halls, those strange chambers slung toward the bottom of those steepest stairs, spiraling down.

BUT FIRST WINTER CONTINUED UPON the dirt, and sunless days too, and as I watched, my wife’s moon dug hollow the night sky, so that what few stars existed must have lived only in the short margins of our steep-sloped horizons, starved of their long circuits, the vacuum they’d before been free to roam. All our atmosphere filled with clouds heavy with rain and snow and sleet and hail, their darkness above us, and yet it never rained or snowed or sleeted or hailed, the strained sky making nothing more than a terrible buzzing, heard whenever I looked up at its unturned arc, and for some time I did not see the bear again, but sometimes I saw her footprints, marked all over the rough dirt—and then, after she sickened further, not footprints but some new dragging, a scrape instead.

The footprints led often past the house and toward the lake, but the scrape appeared motioned in the opposite direction, wet from the water, then from the blood leaking out of the bear from the shore to the dirt to the woods. I wondered if all I had to do to save my wife was to wait for the bear to die, but the fingerling denied even this hope: NO, he said, THE BEAR’S DEATH CHANGES NOTHING, AND STILL THERE WOULD BE THE FALLING MOON.

The fingerling commanded me out of the house and down the slippery glass of the path to the lake, following the scrape to the salted shores of our beach, where we came upon some enormous mass the likes of which I had never imagined, all of its blubbered weight rent unrecognizable by claws and teeth some time before, then left to float, to bob up and down upon the waves until at last it had stranded there in the night, brought high onto the beach by the strange tides our two moons had wrought. What was it that so deeply hurt the bear, what was it that she had killed? For long minutes I stared, unable to make sense of what I saw. It shared no shape I already knew, was instead all shapelessness all over, made punished flesh or cracked mantle or torn appendages, and before its bloated stench all my guesses seemed wrong.

And I wondered: What were the bounds of its shapelessness?

Was it shapeless like a squid, or shapeless like a whale?

THE NEXT TIME I STEPPED across the threshold of my house I shut the door behind me, locked it tight against the dirt. The door’s key swung chained from my neck, then went tucked inside my clothes, over my heart, cold among the hair and the gooseflesh. In haste, so that I might not lose my slight courage, I gathered the few provisions I thought I would need, a single satchel’s worth: only some salted and smoked fish, my gas-lamp and torches and flint, a soon-useless ball of string; the skinning blade; and also what the fight with the bear had won me, the writhing cub-fur with which I was to confront my wife, which I was to guilt her into again clothing the foundling inside.

MEMORY AS FIRST EXPLORATION OF the deep house, as this progression of rooms: To follow the many staircases down to the many landings, the many hallways branching out from behind progressively heavier doors.

To open the first rooms and find the deep house made now a palace of memory, a series of rooms in which what I had forgotten had been curated, collected together with what I had tried to forget, and also with other moments that had occurred only in dreams, or else not at all, not for me.

To find in each room some unadorned spectacle, my wife or me or us together, with or without those children we had failed to have, plus the one she had stolen, that she had passed off as our own. Or not passed off, but made true: It was in those passages that I saw how even if I had not accepted the foundling into my family, still my wife had accepted him into hers, put him at its center, a space I believed I had once occupied, and so our house was divided, and then divided again and again, because what house might stand against a child loved by only one parent, when the jealous other held that same child in suspicion and contempt?

And how for me the fingerling remembered everything.

How the fingerling saw even what I would have left undiscovered, what I did not want to share with him or any other child.

How even then he rode most often in my belly, in my thigh, in my throat, so that he might always be close to the skin, soaking in the new airs I moved my body through. And so he was there too in each of those many rooms, where otherwise there would have been only me, always me, me lonely and me alone among the tiny domains of my wife, sung into being as she passed, echoed throughout the deepening dirt.

In the first room I found piled the cargo we lost to the bear: Here again were the broken vases and cracked crystal, the shattered punch bowls, the punched-out platters.

Here were the shredded rags of my wife’s dress, and beside them my boutonniere, meant to be preserved inside a translucent bubble, now freed from where it had been glassed.

Here was the intricate mechanism of a handmade clock, gifted and then broken, stopped as all other clocks were eventually stopped.

All these objects, seemingly each its own but merely parts of a whole, what in the cave we had lost.

And in this room: her wedding ring, discarded. She had improved everything I had given her but not this, and so its simple band remained only what it had ever been. I held the ring in my hand, and then I took off my own ring, and I laid both upon the stones, touching. Rings had been insufficient to fasten us together, and it would take more than rings to rebind what had been broken.

AND LESS TO END IT, reminded the fingerling. AS YOU HAVE PROMISED. AS I PROMISE YOU WILL.

And in this room: the sound of my wife’s knuckle first sliding beneath the beaten silver of that ring, a sound never before heard, or else forgotten amid all the other business of our wedding day.

And in this room: the footprints she made on the beach where we were wed, where we had stood atop that platform, separated by the priest and then joined by the same, and all this upon that other sunnier shore, where it was not always summer but where often it was summer enough.

And in this room: where my footprints that evening were, not always at her side, only sometimes so. And how I wished it had been different, that I had not walked away at the beginning of our marriage, when I thought it would always be so easy to return.

And in this room: the words I used nearly every summer after, to beg from her one more child, even after she was determined only to stop the trying and also before she found she wanted her motherhood again, wanted it this time for herself, wanted it more than even I had ever wanted or realized.

And in this room: the scent of my wife’s perfume as she passed, a smell once lovely, now stale as glue. And how I missed its original, how I had missed it.

And in this room: every graying hair she pulled from her head or her body in the failed years between the fingerling and the foundling. Every piece of skin she rubbed raw in the bath, when between miscarriages she could not scrub away the hormone-stink of motherhood, falsely begun. All that hair and skin, stuck wet to the floor.

And in this room: A white suit that no longer fit. A shirt that wouldn’t button, a tie that drew its knot too quick around the neck. The relics of a body betrayed against itself, and against my wife, who had not agreed to love what fat and hair it acquired, nor the blank spaces replacing what it had lost, those first few teeth, those other small kindnesses.

And in this room: My wife’s garden, if she had not abandoned its offerings to eat the meat of the woods. What she might have grown with the labors of her hands instead of the song of her voice. What this dirt would have yielded to us, if only she had again given the sun leave to shine.

And in this room: a silver bowl full of her tomatoes, one taste of which revealed the tang of their song-stuff, their lack of right reality, despite skin, despite juice and seeds.

And in this room: all the faces of the fish I had taken from the lake, piled into a single mash of eyes and gills, teeth and scales. How surprised I was to see them, and how easy it was to forget how many lives I took just to keep myself alive, to feed my wife and the foundling. All these bodies, knifed open so we might continue another day.

And in this room: The death of a badger, cradled in steel, rehashed. The static of an action worn down by repetition, this series of moments brought to completion only to begin again, reduced, semi-badgers torn and tortured into some novel shape.

And in this room: an empty space in which, if I had watched long enough, the badger might eventually have been made separate from the trap, freed from its circumstance, if not the damage done.

And in this room: a floor of hides, stitched from the skins of what I had trapped, where I could not stop myself from kneeling upon the floor, from digging the hooks of my fingers into its stitching. I pulled and pulled and undid some of its ties, and from beneath I revealed only more flooring, more skins sewn to skins, and soon there was around me a pit of flesh, a hollow stinking of its taxidermy, and below that only more skin, only more fur.

And in this room: the buzzing of bees and then, elsewhere, another room, full of bees. Two separate rooms, one with the bees themselves, silent, and the other filled only with their sound. How many more rooms I knew there must be if that continued. How much more house it took to keep things separate, to break them down.

And in this room: the smell of decomposing onion and beet, potato and rutabaga—all that vegetal rot.

And in this room: The last sunflowers of my wife’s garden, the first that stretched their petals toward her red moon instead of the sun that barely again rose over the dirt; and if the light of the moon was mere reflection, and the light of two moons doubly so, why then their different hues, against the vast black of the sky?

And in this room: a fistful of black seeds.

In the next room, the shell of the bear: her proud bones stuck through her skin, her bristled fur fallen like pine needles. Her claws pulled from their moorings, her teeth loose in her jaws, her breath rotten as fallen bark, worm-struck as the earth beneath her woods, stinking of meat eaten long past its date, dug up.

And in this room: my wife’s favorite dress, worn the first time she danced with me. How when I held the fabric to my face I smelled nothing, because the smell of her sweat was in another room.

And in this room: a well-scrubbed floor, and on it a well-scoured pot, scratched by the removal of meals we shared, of meals we ate apart.

And in this room: a bowl made of mirrors, so that as I drank of it, it drank of me.

And in this room: the song of the stars, never heard after it was silenced above the dirt, and before that never this clearly. How I had forgotten even what I had forgotten, this series of notes that made a song that made a story, all so hard to retell without their sharp light present, hard to hear or hum even when the stars yet hung from the sky, and impossible now that their shapes had been extinguished. And again my wife had remembered, as I had not.

And in this room: lightning. And in this room: thunder. And in this room: how long it had been since it rained.

And in this room: the smell of a mother’s sadness, but not my wife’s. Hers I would have recognized easily, but this one took some longer effort, for what man could know the tears of a bear, the way her sorrow-sweat stinks, soaked through fur and hide?

How now I could, because the bear had filled my skin with her breath, and if some part of me was the fingerling, so perhaps some other portion was the bear.

And in this room: How my wife made the bear weak. How she lay flat upon the dirt, upon the dirt floor of our cellar, and put her cheek upon the ground. How she whispered songs into the earth, how with those songs’ reverberations she lulled the bear to sleep even as she kept her sleep restless, to delay her rival’s tracking, her waking attempts to move upon the dirt. How the wounds my wife had given the bear worsened, how the bone snapped free of the rib meat, of the fleshy parts of the neck.

AND IN THIS ROOM, THIS new series of rooms that followed: My wife walking out of the house and across the dirt.

My wife lifting the hem of her skirt above the brambles at the tree line, choosing her steps carefully as she navigated the trapped woods.

My wife slowing to look at deer and elk, muskrat and wood-chuck, rabbit and squirrel, all still whole and hearty, sure sign this memory preceded the foundling, our finished family.

My wife stopping to smile from within a pillar of sunlight, such shafts already rare and soon to be rarer still.

My wife not carefree in that dappling, but preparing, gathering strength.

And in this room: the entrance to the cave at the center of the woods, marked only by her footprints in the muck, headed in.

And in this room: my wife traversing the many chambers of the bear’s cave, all descended from the one in which we so briefly lived when first we came to the dirt.

And in this room: my wife gathering the yawning cub below into her arms, then putting some few furs to rest in its place.

And in this room: the bear half lidded, locking its gaze with my wife’s, parent-that-was to parent-to-be. How angry the bear’s yellow eyes were, and how sad my wife’s.

And in this room: the song with which she beat and battered the bear.

Then another room, with the bear’s own song, its curdling attempt to fight in the manner of my wife.

And then another, with the secret of my wife’s ears, stopped up safe with wax and tiny balls of feathers.

And in this room: My wife holding the bear down with her song, then lulling that giant back to sleep. Then leaning in close, putting her lips inside the tickle of the bear’s ear, and there whisper-singing a lie, a vision to replace the truth: to make the bear believe she had awoken already and in her hunger devoured her cub, so that it might live no more, so that it might be back inside her, a jumble of leg and paw, face and fur, all feeding the one who fed it.

And in this room: How my wife was not sure she had succeeded until months later, when the bear awoke from her long hibernation to howl her shamed horror into the earth, to fill her cave with worse sound, to shake the earth and also the trees above, frightening the birds to flight, the beasts to quivering in their burrows and their beds, and afterward the woods seemed emptier, occupied only with what ruined fauna the bear and I would make together.

And in this room: A single moment, captured during the long lonely climb out of the cave, the sleeping cub cradled to her breast. A single note of the song she sung as she climbed, that secret song I knew so well, which she had practiced upon the dirt while I slept locked inside our bedchambers.

A single note, and yet how I knew what it could do, and what other notes would follow, and how I knew that even before she emerged into the air of the woods the cub was no cub at all.

How I knew all this at that first note, knew it even before I found the other rooms containing some other single sound of that transformation from bear cub to foundling, finished even before she arrived at our front door, the entrance to a house at last filled with family.

And in this room: again a ball of furs, same as I carried in my satchel, but memory made, song grown.

How I removed the true fur, bear given, and how I held it in one hand, then this song-made copy in the other.

How when I picked the two furs up again, I could not remember which was which, and so took them both.

And in this room, in these rooms, a vision: mine or my wife’s, of all the stars that had fallen out of the sky and into the lake; of those stars falling still, descending sputtering through the deepest water, then past into some other darkness, where for a time they might light the wide hollows below.

AND IN THIS ROOM: THE love letters we wrote to each other in the months of our courtship, aflame. This then the last seconds of their existence, when we burned them on the eve of our wedding, when my wife said that the words inked by my hand and by hers were the words of lovers but not spouses and that after we were joined we would need new letters with which to profess new promises.

But never again did we write each other, because afterward we always had each other so close.

What I would have given to be able to stand the heat of those old immolations, to have been brave enough to thrust my hand into their flaming shapes so as to read whom it was my wife had loved, so as to again become that person.

And in this room: the moment of our first lovemaking, which did not occur in the house but in that other country where we lived when we were first married, its cities once reachable by the road that led around the lake that, until we lost the head of its trail, could have taken us back home.

And in this room: a moment even earlier, the first time my wife raised her dress to me, exposing her battered shins. And then in another the first time I saw the bruises that blacked her knees and tendered the skin of her thighs.

And then, in another, the first time, long after those first times, when I realized she’d done this to herself.

And in this room: a memory of my parents, a story I had told my wife.

My parents, who should have taught me how to be a parent myself.

Who tried but perhaps could not succeed, for what did they know of families on this side of the lake, the mountains?

In their own country, children lived and lived and lived, and so many of our structures were unnecessary there, would be bright madness if erected in their shining world.

And in this room: the blanched face of the father of my wife in the moment I asked for his daughter. How it was my wife’s permission I needed, and yet I did not seek it until others had promised her hand.

And in this room: my father’s voice, telling me the purpose of a marriage was the improvement of a man and a woman, each meant to make the other better.

It is enough, he said, and also, You cannot expect to make the world better, not by any love.

He said it was only to my wife that I was responsible for my actions, and only to me that she could be held to the same standards. And as he said this I knew he believed it, that he did not know he was wrong, and that in his wrongness it was his duty to me he had not considered.

And in this room: the smile on his face as he said those words, which at the time I mistook for friendship, a bond we had not previously enjoyed.

And in this room: My younger father, years earlier, telling me what it means to be a man. My ungrayed mother, telling me what it means to be a husband. These two talks, which did not take place at the same time, joined here as they never were, so that I would be reminded that their advice was anything but the same thing—and also I wondered how my wife knew, how she knew these parts of me to take, to put into her own deep house as if they were hers—and it was the fingerling who provided the answer, who reminded me of what flesh she took to make her moon.

And in this room, in this series of rooms: Why we moved to the dirt between the lake and the woods, the reason different than what always I had believed before. And how this was something she never told me, even though we were husband and wife. And in each room of that floor one action of a sequence was made distinct from the last, so that the crush of her father’s body atop her mother’s was separated from how his knees punched into her thighs, pinning them to their mattress. Then the blows she struck across the meat of his forearms as they moved his hands to her throat. Then how her father choked her mother. Then how he lifted her head by the throat, then how he struck the headboard with her skull until he had broken both.

And in this room: another reason my wife had not at first wanted children of her own, even as I wanted them more than anything else. The genes of a killer, the genes of someone killed; half of what her parents had, but which half?

And in this room, another space, filled by the fingerling saying, THAT IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. THAT IS HOW YOU SHOULD MAKE IT TO BE.

And in this room: How my wife had known what her father was, how he had hurt her too, and how she had lived with the hurt because it meant that her mother received less.

How after my wife left his house for mine, then her mother had no one left to protect her.

How my wife blamed herself for this, and how she also blamed me, for taking her away.

And in this room: The sound of my wife singing herself to sleep. The sound of her voice keeping her company. The sound of a song that made temporary ghosts to appear and then to sing her songs along. How she punished herself for her loss. How she promised that her own children would be born into a world without sadness, without tragedy, without death, or at least without the death of parents. How she determined to make that world and only then to give me the children I claimed to want, and how she planned to keep those children safe.

How if she could not keep this promise, she would rather not have any children at all, no matter how I begged.

And what bruises accompanied these words.

What burns and shallow cuts.

What years those wounds lasted, scabbed over, healed, replaced, scarred white.

Those pale textures, all previously hidden in places I would never look, or where I had stopped looking, or else in plain sight where again I failed to see or understand.

And in this room: how I told my wife that by taking her away I would keep her safe.

On some new dirt, I told her, she would no longer hurt herself, no longer visit upon her body what frustrations she gathered from the busy world around her, its tall buildings, its crammed streets.

Our new world, it would be quieter, simpler.

Our new world, it would be just her, would be just me, just us and the babies I then hoped—that I hoped we both hoped—would become our family.

As if to prove my love I should remove her from all that she knew. As if to keep her mine, I had to share her with no one.

And in this room: my wife saying she does not want children, that she has never wanted children.

And in this room: my wife saying that she is tired, that her body aches, that her breasts are sore from years of unpurposed lactation, and that she does not want to live this way.

And in this room: my wife saying Please, saying Please stop.

And in this room: My wife pleading that a husband and a wife are still a family. That two are enough.

And then, in another room down the hall, my voice replying, my voice saying, No.

And in this room: all the arguments by which I hoped to leverage her first to try and then to keep trying, even as in the aftermath she hurt her body, then the house and the dirt and the sky.

And in this room: How inside a mother bear a cub might float for months before starting its arc toward birth. How it might remain a tiny bundle of cells, dividing slowly, until the bear’s body decided conditions were right, that there was enough food stored inside the sleeping mother, enough of whatever else it took to make a cub. How my wife thought of this often, this bear-knowledge she knew, as pregnancy after pregnancy we failed to fill her with what stuff she needed to bring forth our child, our children.

And in this room: the moment of the fingerling’s conception, when the half-body of my making entered the half-body of my wife’s, and how from that moment part of me grew inside part of her. And even in that moment her seeing how jealous I was, despite how I tried to hide it, from that first moment until the one months later, when the fingerling passed from her body and into my hand, where while she howled I claimed the two halves of us for myself, so that they might grow inside my flesh instead.

And in this room: the shape of that heartbreak, a slim black tear, the length of a finger.

And in this room: the fingerling’s crib, its small wooden frame, its thin pad and song-spun blanket filthied with the garden dirt.

And in this room: the times my wife touched me while I was asleep, happening here in sequence but cut away from their context, their chronology recognizable only by the changes in my body, in hers. How long she persisted. How I thought throughout that we were already estranged, that in our silences we were to come undone, unravel from our bonds. And yet in this room she ran her hands beneath the sheets, across the width of my widening back, traced her fingers through the salts of the day’s working, then wrapped her arm around the slumbering bulk of my belly, that round shape girthed heavier than that she had first married, that she then still loved.

And in this room: How I touched her too. How every time it left a mark.

AND IN THESE ROOMS, MORE component parts, more wife-shaped pieces of our past, and as we walked I decided that despite the fingerling’s insistence and my undiminished fear of the bear I would find some way to escape the bonds of my promise. I told the fingerling I would continue to pursue my wife and the foundling but not to hurt them worse, only to beggar myself before them, to bloody my knees with my apology, and the fingerling said, NO, said, WE GO NOT TO FIX THAT FAMILY BUT TO END IT.

YOU PROMISED THE BEAR, he said. YOU PROMISED ME.

You spoke with my voice, I said. You promised, and only you.

I said this, but I knew it was not true, and afterward the fingerling said nothing else, but for a time he knocked about my stomach and then the cavity of my chest and then both at once and other places besides, voice box and the clicking joint at the back of my jaw, then back down, through organs I could not feel until he hurt them, gall bladder and spleen and liver and others whose names I knew only in abstract or only when pulled from the bodies I had trapped.

The fingerling hurt me until all that remained lay prostrate on the ground, where I pleaded for him to stop, to show his father mercy, but he only twisted me worse, claimed I was no father of his—and of course if he wanted to be right, then he was right, because even if I called him my child I knew he was not, not anymore.

And in this room: The voice of the foundling as I had rarely heard it, as he talked to my wife when they were alone. A voice high and eloquent, curious and questioning, so different from the silence that blanked his wild face whenever I appeared.

And in this room: the number of times my wife hurt the foundling, even accidentally. A number so close to zero.

And in this room, the number of times the foundling touched me without fear, counted up and counted through, each enumeration instanced, made distinct: Here was the foundling wiggling his tiny fingers in his crib.

Here him clutching my then-offered finger, here him putting that finger into his mouth, biting hard.

Here the foundling crawling toward my lake-mudded boots, then his body mounted atop the mound of my foot.

Here the foundling asking me to lift him into my lap, asking me with his hands because he had not yet learned to speak.

Here the foundling pushing my hands away from his mother’s, so that he might have her instead.

Here, here, here and here and here, some few others all so similar and the same, and all when the foundling was youngest and then barely ever again.

And in this room: The foundling’s first step, first word, first loving profession. All the firsts I missed, away, sequestered with my own oldest son, ghost of might have been. This well-loved triptych of action, of sound, of affection—and what could our other son do in response but spit, but chew and gnaw every reach to which he found access.

And in this room: the many faces my wife had since made the foundling, shaped from the ruins of his old face, the one burned free by our final pot of stew. How she sang his flesh into new shapes, laid fresh expressions atop the face she had given him as an infant, and now he was a child remade in her own image, remade again and again until why bother with a name at all, because how would we recognize the one to whom it belonged?

In that room I said his name anyway, and even this did not go unpunished, and afterward the fingerling hissed: THE FOUNDLING, he said. THE FOUNDLING AND ONLY THAT. CALL HIM THAT, OR CALL HIM NOTHING.

AND BETTER NOTHING.

BETTER NEVER AGAIN.

And in this room: How bears will eat their young. How in the right anger or hunger, they will end what they have made, will strike it down with claw, will rend it apart with tooth. How a bear will swallow the bones that she birthed. How a bear will lick free the marrow that started within her. How a bear’s fur will become matted with blood that it once shared, umbilical, placental, pumped heart to heart.

And in this room: the argument that no woman would do such a thing, nor any man.

And yet this fingerling swallowed into my stomach; and yet this punishment and parenthood spread between my bones.

And in this room, in this whole final series of rooms, something else, not memory but prophecy, or else memories of the future, of the people we would be when we arrived there, or as perhaps we had already arrived, in a world where so much was made to circle, to roundabout: Her, asleep in a burning bed. Her, fevered beyond recognition. Her, waiting for me to reach her chambers. Her, not caring if I ever did or else not able to care. Her, happy with her foundling and then sending the foundling away. Her, dead or dying but only if I did nothing.

So much of what I saw there was only possibility made flesh and space, made room and what goes inside a room: all this purity of potential, all this stripping down to the elements, and now the eleventh element, named long after it had become all I had, all I hoped to see.

There were twelve elements, and the eleventh was called memory.

Memory, as all the earth was filled with, as all our bones.

Memory, an element breaking and taking apart the others, storing them away.

Memory, so that even after the other elements were gone they were still there, so that even after they were used up they were already returning.

HOW LONG I SEARCHED FOR her, and how many more rooms I entered, and as I searched how my beard widened its dishevelment, how my fingernails grew longer and more yellowed, caked beneath with dirt, with some rare fish and fowl stolen from memory-lake, from mystery-woods. How the years passed, and how much older I was after, and how rarely hungry anymore, full anyway with the stuff of my taking, with what the bear had put inside me.

How next my muscles slipped waxy down my bones. How my hair faded, star white as my wife’s eyes after they paled with her sadness, after the making of the moon and the coming of the foundling. How with no seasons there was only watch-time left to track, a circle circling circles, that mechanism passed down by my father, which had marked all the hours of his marriage until he gave it to me, at the beginning of mine.

How then my watch stopped.

How something like years passed, even with no record, and still I climbed farther downward into the deep house, into its spires plunging into the depths of the earth, until at last there were no more rooms, no more passageways, only a chamber that led to the landing at the top of a great stairs, of a series of steps spiraling into a blackness that my sight could not penetrate or pierce.

Into a black, the twelfth and final element, into which I would not go.

Into a black, which unlike all the other elements had no twin I then knew upon the surface, between the dirt and the sky.

The black, awful as it was, I believed then it could be found only in caves, in lakes, at the bottom of houses, and who knew what was below it, what was waiting within?

We looked out into the darkness from atop those first widened and also taller steps, perceived the enormity yawning before us: At that depth, there was again wind, blowing up from the chasm below, and also there was something like rain, water dropping from some ceiling above, some higher height far above where the fingerling and I stood, that low spot we had descended to that was still not low enough, for it did not contain what we sought. The walls ahead were so distant as to be invisible, or else the dark was so dense that they were close but not knowable, and below us that bottomless black soared, and despite my long want I trembled, and so did the fingerling.

I was already an old man, skin flapping upon the flagpole of my bones, and still I waited as if there were more time coming, as if my clock were not run out. But after I grew restless I also grew brave, or at least brave enough to crawl on my belly to the dark end of that platform, to yell my wife’s name down into the void.

There was no answer to my many shouts, not even an echo, and how far did the drop have to be for there to be no echo? How far away the walls?

How far away my wife?

The fingerling claimed that even if she had descended these stairs into the black, she could not have survived the cold and darkness I felt from below, nor whatever worse world surely lay at such a bottom, and as I lay there, lacking the will to go on, my belly upon the freezing stone, I felt each tensile moment stretch, closed my eyes as if to sleep. But then I did not sleep, could not against the pain that followed, as the fingerling divided himself again and again, found unclaimed organs to inhabit, new stations from which to weave a plan, one befitting my increased cowardice, and when at last he spoke his voice was newly deeper, aged as I had aged.

He said, IF YOUR PURSUIT IS ENDED, THEN IT IS TIME FOR US TO LEAVE.

For an age I ceded some sliver of control, then more and more, so that I would not always have to think of what I’d done, what I knew he would compel me soon to do. And then to pretend that I could turn back, once I had stepped even one foot upon that path, but not to have to pay for my mistake, not quickly, and always to carry this reminder, this memory as an inversion of responsibility: To no longer want to fish for fish or trap for mammals. To no longer want to eat at all. To be so old already, and to feel my long life heavy upon me, upon the body that was not quite mine now that the fingerling had aged too, so that from the womb of my stomach he might grow into a ghost the shape and size of a man, or else many ghosts assembled in the shape of the same, and in my frustrated despair I let this ghost lead us upward, away from the great stairs, toward the trapdoor miles above, at the back of our first cellar, that threshold that I hoped might still exist. And also to know that it was not the father who was supposed to take orders from the son. To know that it was not the son who was meant to show the father how to exist in the world, how to be one with the qualities of its elements.

If only I had been stronger.

If only I had not pretended to believe his lie, that his plan would smoke her out, would again return her to the surface, where I might more easily beg of her what I wished to beg.

If only that, then not this: Together the fingerling and I left that landing, ascended until we reached the next-highest floor, the deepest of the deeper rooms, the last proper chamber before the climb down to the landing atop the great stairs.

There we moved as one, acted together in deed no matter how separate our reasons, and together we took kit and kindle from my satchel, sparked flames to light one of the last torches we had brought, and with it we set fire to one room after another, until the flames spread to all the deep house my wife had made, the house she had made for me.

THE SLATE AND STONE OF the walls refused to burn, but in between there were plenty of shapes that would, and so the deep house was emptied. Soon my fingers streaked and burned with the hot pitch of my torches, and if I had only begun to cough before, now I started again, my body often bent and stalled, jerking against the smoky walls of my wife’s hallways until my lungs were cleared enough to go on. When I could walk again I continued to light my fires, and as I moved away from their consumption I climbed always upward, through the rising smoke. At last I crouched along some smallest passage, and at its end I found a ladder that led to a trapdoor, an entrance to the house not previously used. Behind me I could see the flames following, and so I did not hesitate, did not turn back to look for the entrance I had previously used: With what haste I could muster I climbed past the trapdoor’s sung hinges to stand into the original cellar of our house, that cubed dirt lined with long-rotted tubers and dusty jars of what had once been fruit, and although the fire had climbed behind me it did not yet burst through. For a while I was afraid, not yet sure if it would, but like so many other elements of our world it seemed unable to cross over even the least threshold, this trapdoor’s lip up from the deep house. For some time the smoke still exited that hole and also some others, and its heat persisted for many months, a danger also made some grace, for that heat warmed the house that otherwise would have been so very cold, too frozen to hope to hold our happy living.

Returned to the house I had built, I found its rooms as empty of wife and foundling as ever, and also newly damaged, shattered upon their frames: Unguarded, our house had been visited by the bear, whose footprints now circled the house, and I found the windows smashed in by her blows, the logs of our walls tortured loose from their studs. Everywhere there was loosed fur and dried snot marking the house as no territory of ours, and then I knew what I should have suspected, that she had tried to follow us down into the deep house, that if she had fit through any of the openings leading below, then surely we would have seen her there.

What foolishness it was to return, I told the fingerling. What danger you have put us both in, and still we are no closer to your mother, to the better son that clings to her side.

To prove he could, he tortured me for my words, pressed in upon all the many nerves now at his command—and so our climb was ended by this homecoming celebrated only with weeping upon my knees, with beating my fists against the cursed dirt I found waiting outside the house, with hurling my voice at the moon-bent sky, its tortured gossamer hanging lower now than ever before.