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

3

ACROSS THE TREE LINE FOR the first time in years or decades, in perhaps some other longer length unreckonable as all time then was, I arrived there unprepared for the changes visited upon the woods, how its low spaces choked with rough-edged hedges, with brambles and thickets, so that all my old passages were no more. With some effort I reached the burying ground, and found within it the last fallow patch beneath the boughs and thorns, last remnant of my small incursion upon the land of the bear, where still nothing fresh would grow.

My traps had been set according to the dictates of experience and long routine, but with this new arrangement of scrub and thorn I could not easily find where I’d placed them. Warily at first, then bolder as over some days the bear failed to appear, I began to hack through the denseness of the brush until I thought I had found each trap, including some still containing the bones or part of the bones of some animal caught long ago, in the first days after I armed the steel jaws that undid them: Here a muskrat, crumbled into tiny ribs, tiny skull, here a wolf undone the same, here a trampled otter and there some fox.

I reset my traps, and each day after I visited that dark-soiled burying ground, carrying with me some new-caught wastrel nearly bare of fur and fight, and as I interred it into the cold, hard dirt, I checked again the newer graves I had earlier dug. None had been disturbed, and still there was no bear nor even any sign of her, and as I cut new paths through the trees I found I could not even find my way back to her cave, that entrance with which I was once so familiar. For a time I began to imagine that the bear had passed away in my long absence from the dirt and the woods and the lake, but the fingerling did not believe it, did not let me believe.

Long before, I had professed a belief that what a man did for his wife was to build her a house, and so in the absence of the bear and my unwillingness to leave I made some move to rebuild what had been broken, what worn-out house remained. The smoke from below had grown less strong, and the dirt even colder, and so I wrapped myself in new furs uncured and still smelling of the woods, then crossed the tree line to knock down some fresh trees from which to cut logs for our walls. It took some manner of days to drag each across the dirt, and by the time I had some sizable number beside the crooked house I realized I no longer remembered how I’d built it, or else what I did remember did not apply to rebuilding. With nothing else to do I moved from dirt to lake to woods to house to cellar, where often when I could not sleep I sat above the trapdoor to the world below, breathing in the fading smoke-smell and expelling it back out, calling my wife’s name down into the dark, a repetition of my cowardice atop the great stairs, repeated until my breath came slower and harder, until my voice was choked silent, my lungs packed with the fingerling’s thick shapes, their oily jelly.

Even with the house’s slivered walls punched full of holes it was still warmer inside than out, and so I lay on the floor beside our bed, that better shape broken by the bear’s frustrated blows or else some collapsing portion of our house’s roof, and there I made myself a nest of old furs, all stale smelling but no worse off than I had left them, with no moths or rats living upon the barrenness of the dirt to chew their hides. Through the gaping roof I watched the two moons, and the rooms of the house flickered with the weird days and the long nights and their heavy glow, their differing shafts of damp light filtered by the splinters of our struts and beams.

The sky was so close then, and without stars or clouds I could see how far it had bent, at how sharp an angle it now rested, encumbered by the extra bulk of my wife’s barely aloft construction. The dirt and the house were silent, except for the wind bearing the creaking sounds of the strained curvature above, and I wondered how long we would be safe there and also if, when her moon fell, my wife and the foundling would be saved beneath the dirt, or the bear within her cave.

And then one night there came another creak.

And then on another night, another.

And then some other night when the fingerling said, IT IS TIME TO FLEE THE DIRT, TO RETURN TO WHERE YOU ONCE CAME FROM.

IT IS TIME TO TAKE ME TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LAKE, AND OVER THE MOUNTAINS BEYOND, WHERE YOU WILL CEASE, WHERE YOU WILL RELEASE ME, WHERE I WILL LIVE AND LIVE AND LIVE IN YOUR STEAD. AND SO AT LEAST SOME PART OF YOU WILL GO ON.

And that night I sat heavy with his words, and sometime later the buzzing sky begin to crack from its burden, forked everywhere with lightning that flashed across its surface but then did not disappear, instead remaining through the accompanying thunder and then beyond, and as I wondered at the lightning’s indelible persistence the fingerling spoke again.

WIFE AND FOUNDLING AND BEAR, he said, AND YOU UNABLE TO SAVE EVEN A SINGLE ONE.

And still I held my stubborn position, as always I had meant to hold it.

THE SMOKE FROM THE DEEP house stopped, and afterward everything turned to ice, all the world except the lake, its salted surface, and how long my life might have persisted like that, with me waiting white bearded and bent of body, if not for an injury worse than any other I had suffered: Cutting my way through the new and thicker brush of the woods, I stupidly put my foot into one of my own traps, its mechanism concealed beneath the undergrowth, and then I was caught by that forgotten device, some snare that the fingerling had failed to warn me away from, as he had warned me from so many others.

The snapping clasp of the trap’s mechanical jaws caught me by the ankle, breaking the skin and cutting muscle and tendon, and as the pain burned through my stuck leg I howled as so many other beasts had howled, screamed my accusations, screamed out my anger at the fingerling. At last he hoped to be proved stronger than me, and how I feared he was, all his smirking shapes together perhaps at last a better ghost than I was a man.

To plan the sawing of knife through bone, but again to fail to commit. To wail and drag at my broken, bloody leg, hauling the chained trap behind me in some limited circle, but to hear no response except the same silence that had already filled that frozen wood.

To despair, but to keep my feet, because to sit down upon the ice-strewn ground would be the first step toward giving up, toward accepting the death the fingerling had led me into, or else the begging for my life he hoped would win him his desires.

To sit down anyway, because eventually there was no strength left for the standing.

To feel my breathing shallow, my pulse slow. To close my eyes, and see nothing except the fingerling’s clumping movements inside my head, behind my eyes, his dark sparks and darker flashes.

To hear nothing, and then after the nothing at last something new, and then the fingerling’s agitated voice, saying NO, saying NO, saying NOT HIM.

To open my eyes to spy the approaching foundling, that boy who had never before been brave enough to cross the tree line, who had so rarely wandered even that far without my wife making soft tracks behind him, now trudging toward me through the bracken and the bramble, at last unafraid of the woods or else made the master of his fear.

I struggled, staggered to what remained of my feet, and then I called out to the foundling, said, We do not have much time.

I said, You should not be here, in these woods.

I said, Get out, and then I said it again and then again, and with each repetition of my warning the foundling recoiled but did not retreat, and also the fingerling raged furious, hardened his grip around my already-pressed organs, and still I tried to speak, croaking each breathless word, each syllable tasting of bile, of rotten teeth and ghosted flesh.

Help me, I said.

I said, Help me, but hurry.

The foundling I’d known was merely a child and might not have had the strength to open the jaws of the trap. This foundling was not so differently shaped, still small despite the decades passed between us, but he had little trouble yanking loose my injured leg, and if he was not careful he was at least quick, and if he hurt me worse at least I was cleared of what steel had caught me.

My ankle looked no better once freed, its bones and muscles and flesh sorely wrecked, but whatever pains the foundling caused were far less than how the fingerling would have seen me hurt, and also shamed and broken, and when the foundling stepped underneath my armpit I flinched so abruptly I nearly fell again—because what would the fingerling do now—and also how long had it been since anyone had touched me, since any other had tried to help?

With the foundling’s body supporting me—he was hard and wiry then, muscled like a man despite his prepubescent shape—we stumbled slow through the brambles, then out the woods, across the tree line, toward the house. As we crossed the dirt, I saw that the foundling’s once-burned face was somehow again unmarked, but also that he remained not quite well, and so he was joined to our family in this other way, how in each of us there dwelled some sickness, some scarred tissue or flustered potential, turned bone, twisted muscle: For the foundling, there was some fever found in the deepest reaches of the house, wet lands I had not seen. Or maybe it was the fire itself, caught in his flesh as it was so recently caught in the rooms of the deep house, the palace my wife had made, the ruins to which I’d had those rooms reduced.

Inside the house, I wrapped my already-swollen, bruised ankle in torn furs, the only bandages I could make. The inner hides filled fast with pooling blood, but I did not change them immediately, as first I thought to deal with the foundling, whose own illness seemed more pressing. There was no proper bed big enough to lay him upon, but there was my nest of blankets beside the broken one my wife and I had shared, and so I took him into the bedchamber, where I stripped off his sodden clothes, then wiped his body dry with the cleanest of our rough cloths. It took me aback to see how little he had changed against how old I had become, how heavy the decades lay upon my bones, and then I was startled again, at how passive his face remained while I toweled him, the foundling standing dispassionate, a child waiting beside the washtub for someone else to dress him.

In the absence of clocks I did not know how long it had been since the day the foundling’s mother took him away, but however many decades it had been his shape had aged only unto the cusp of adolescence: His shoulders and chest were still those of a boy, and there was no hair upon his lips or cheeks, nor under his arms or between his legs. Even the long, uncut hair upon his head was thin, thinner than I remembered, and as I stroked it off his hot face the fingerling made another heat inside my hands, a prickling numbness that took with it some portion of my senses there, so that I could not feel anymore the texture of the boy’s skin—and yet what little I felt I clung to, and did not forget: the foundling, a boy preserved by the devices of my wife, by her voice, her voice’s song.

Despite his fever, I covered the foundling in what other blankets I had, then took my bucket down to the lake, hobbling all the way, and fetched it full of the lake’s freezing water. Back in the bedroom, I found the boy asleep, his face senseless, his tossing body turning the sheets as I tried to quiet his movements with one hand so I could apply cool cloths with the other. Soon the room smelled wetly of sickness and salt, and despite the deep pain in my other joints I thanked the fingerling for my numb fingers, which could not feel the near ice of the lake water dripping from their age-spotted joints, and all the while that other son churned in my gut, overflowed my stomach with his bile, flooded my intestines with barely held diarrhea, filled my eyes with cruddy tears—and how I ached as he pushed his shapes outward, bulged my skin to make more room for his rage, his accusations, his righteous claims of dominion.

How I fought him then as I had not since the burning of the deep house.

How I fought him limb by limb, digit by digit, so that he might not bring harm to the foundling, but to do so not yet for the foundling’s sake, or not his sake alone.

Soon old hurts began to throb, and also there was my shattered ankle, which I unwrapped and studied by the light of the moons. I spent what water remained washing the wound somewhere out back of the house, where thick clots and then new blood puddled the frozen earth. What remained beneath was almost too wrecked to call an ankle, and never again did I walk straight or stand perfectly upright, but when my ankle was as clean as it could be, I wrapped it in fresh fur, making myself a boot as I had once made an armor.

Afterward I returned to the house, to the bedroom inside the house where the foundling slept, where he would sleep for some long period, during which I would keep some close vigil, during which I would leave him only twice: once to remove him something to eat from the woods, and once more to return to where the foundling had found me, so that I might drag some branches behind me, obscuring the smaller footprints he left in the blood-thawed earth nearby, so that if the bear did still live I might believe she would not so easily find his sign.

The foundling was awake again when I returned to the house the second time, sweating and shaking but able to stand and speak, his voice as high and lilting as ever. He complained of his long hunger and of the dirt’s cold air, and when I pressed him to speak of his mother instead or at least first, he only repeated his complaints. In response I dressed him in my old clothes, and where those fit wrong I modified them with my knife, holding the cloth away from his body so I might slice some strips from the bottom of his shirt, from the low hem of his trousers. Afterward I sat him down at the table, and there I opened him a hairless rabbit to eat, warmed it as best I could.

While he ate I watched his face for the fear I had expected to see, but now he seemed unafraid of this room in which his features had been undone, perhaps because his face was no longer exactly that same face, not that of the son my wife had masqueraded before me, no longer a blend of my features and hers. Now I was removed altogether, by the same method by which my wife had smoothed his scars, by the way long before that she had removed the many aspects of the bear.

After he was finished, the foundling got down from his seat, came over to stand before mine, and as he placed his hand into the wiry nest of my beard, all my body quivered toward his touch. I opened my arms with more hesitance than I wished, but he did not hesitate, only climbed into my lap, curled against my chest. He was too big to hold like this, but it was what I wanted, and anyway he was asleep before I could push him away, and as I held him, daring not to move, again and always the fingerling howled, accused, called me traitor. And did I bother to answer?

No, I did not, for what other answer was there that he would accept?

WHEN THE FOUNDLING NEXT AWOKE, I fed him the rest of his rabbit, then worked the warped iron of our stove to heat him some water, found him soap to bathe away the last of his fever smell.

I waited while he scrubbed and dried and dressed, and then I begged him to speak, to tell me of his mother, of my wife.

I said, Tell me it all, and do not stop, no matter what you see upon my face or what I do with my hands.

I said, I am not always in control of who I am, but I do not want you to be afraid of me, not anymore.

The foundling nodded, and then he said he knew, that he had long known.

He said, My mother showed me the man you used to be. She made many rooms to show me, and also to show you, so that when next we were together you would be yourself again, your right self, and we would not have to be afraid.

He said, She made a house for you, put all of herself inside it for you to recognize, but even after you saw what she wanted to say still you never came to where we were, although often we thought that you would.

He said—and here I heard his adult voice most, a deepness hidden within his child-shape—he said, Do you know how sad it made her to have you refuse her forgiveness? Do you know how sad it made me, to find you out in the woods, playing with your stupid traps?

The foundling and his mother had listened for my footsteps, and then my longer periods of stopping, resting or else slow consideration. He said that sometimes his mother said she heard me running, that I was moving faster now, that at last I was coming and that soon we would all be reunited.

Other times, he said, I would pause so long that they wept for fear of my death, for his mother said only the collapse of my bones could have stopped my advance, could have kept me away.

The foundling said he’d watched his mother waste herself to make the deep house, singing her bones inside out, making of her sweat salty rivers in which to cool my face and of her flesh banquet rooms in which to feast my hunger—but I remembered no such meals, and told the foundling so.

Certainly there were rooms of flies and rooms of maggots and rooms of garbage, I said. Certainly there were poison-rimmed goblets, plates powdered with pressed privet, tetanus-stilled beasts caught in rusty traps.

The foundling shook his too-small head, stopped the advance of his story.

Mother said you’d say that, he said.

He said, She said you were afraid of her, and also of me. That something had put a fear in you, and that now you were wary. And still she said we should wait for you to arrive, still she said you would arrive transformed.

What if deep house was not all there was beneath the earth? What if there was deep dirt? What if there was deep woods and deep lake? What if my wife was then making some new world beneath the dirt, and only my cowardice atop the great stairs had kept me from reaching it, from taking part in its reconfigured elements?

What if I could become deep father and she deep mother and the foundling or the fingerling our deep child, and what if the whole world I had known—all that lake and dirt and house and woods and bear and what was not a bear, all that father and mother and child and ghost-child and moon and moons—what if all that was failed forever, doomed by our years of childlessness, our despair over those long years?

What if my wife had known how to leave it all behind? What if she had tried to tell me, and what if I had not listened?

EXHAUSTED OF HIS STORY, THE foundling slept in my lap, and as he slept I stroked his hair as I had stroked my wife’s, as I had once hoped to stroke the fingerling’s, when I still imagined he might be a boy.

And how the fingerling hated this substitution, the equivalency it suggested, and how he wished me to stop.

How he knew what I was doing, what I planned to do next, and as warning he filled me with his black feelings, attempted to rob me of my enjoyment, my small joy at this first night of new fatherhood, and with his movements he kept me even from sleep, from indulging in my exhaustion to take some simple slumber of father and son. I held the foundling, and the fingerling moved agitated within me, and soon I began to feel some dull pain in my shoulders, then my arms and hands.

A prickling, then a numbness, then the prickling again.

Soon my jaw ached, and I shifted the foundling so that I could free one hand to rub at its joint, then to clear the sweat from my forehead.

I had barely eaten since the arrival of the foundling, but now I felt like I had eaten too much, and if I could not still my stomach then I thought I would have to wake the foundling, send him to sleep somewhere else.

Last I felt the squeezing in my chest, like a fist wrapped around my heart, its grip bearing down, then letting up, then bearing down, a kind of contraction I had never before known, and at this touch I knew the fingerling’s intent, recognized his goal even if he kept silent as he worked. In the years of our long cohabitation he had found his way into every part of my shape except my head and my heart, but now he moved to enter fully my centermost chamber, and I felt him move to block that pulsing organ, shaping his many bodies into some plug or plugs with which to stop me where I sat, and when his work was complete I seized in my chair, the jerking of my body so violent it bucked the foundling from my embrace.

I grappled dumbly at my chest, pounded the skin and sternum that separated my hands from my heart, and as I floundered the awakened foundling dragged me gasping from my seat and onto the rough-boarded floor of our house. I spasmed upon the boards, and soon I could not feel my pulse or my breathing, but still I sensed the fingerling everywhere now, every part of him on the move, and against him I sensed the foundling working from without, setting his hands upon my chest, his lips on my lips. And when that failed he began to speak, and then his speech turned to song, made a new music that even in my dying I knew I had never heard before.

The song the foundling sang was not just sound but also smell and sight, also touch and taste, and also light, also not-black—and with it the foundling drove his brother out of my center, back to my stomach, to my thigh, those first hiding places now again made far from what remained of me—and when the fingerling was secured, my body jerked upon the floor, all of me weakened and sweat soaked and in terrible pain.

But even in my pain I found a reveling, this returned life worth celebrating: For a moment all I felt was the glorious pounding of my heart, the busy way my lungs bellowed, that first breath so filling my chest with air that I thought I might never have to breathe again.

FROM UNDER THE WOODS THE bear had brought back all I had killed and buried, roaring them from the burying ground into new and uncut threads, perhaps diminished shades of their former shapes but at least not dead. That too was how I returned, lessened of some portion of my manhood, of what awful man I had been, but also of what protections the bear had given me: Soon my adrenaline faded, and then I began to wheeze, and then also to hack, until I expelled some number of dark clots onto the floor. Afterward the foundling helped me back into my chair, then sat down, crossed his legs before me. Even that short climb winded me, and in my chair I gasped for air, clutched at my chest. The pain radiated everywhere except the places the fingerling had been driven, and in those holdings numbness prevailed.

Despite some lingering nausea, I felt the fullness of my appetite return, a ravening long ago put aside, now returned to announce my restored need, and then suddenly I realized the foundling was speaking and that I had not been listening. I pulled myself straighter, then slumped again, placed my elbows unsteady upon my knees, let my head tilt to one side or the other. From that stance I could not see the foundling’s face well, and as he talked I struggled to understand the words he made, his stuttered syllables high pitched and softly spoken. I asked him to start again, to speak slowly until this story was told, the only story that had ever happened to him alone: not the story of his time with my wife in the deep and deepest houses, but of his journey away from her side.

As we had burned the deep house empty so the foundling had watched his mother catch a fever she could not cool, and as she burned she diminished: her breasts flattened, her skin loosened, until she was all bones and jaundice. But still the foundling stayed at her side, and still he sometimes drank from her, for eventually there was no other food, and after what little milk my wife had left soured soon he too was sick, the fever that filled her filling him. And with each meal he took from her he had to know his mother was dying.

The hot house above burned, and as it did her skin reddened, then blistered and flaked off, and the foundling had the scars to prove it, bands of once-blistered flesh on his hands and wrists, earned smoothing back the smoking snakes of his mother’s hair. When his mother could not lift her head to cry or her hands to feel, the foundling had crawled into their bed for the last time, curved his stalled bones inside the skinny ess of her own.

Cradled in that last cradle, the foundling wept, and as she burned away his tears his mother spoke.

I know your face, she said, but you are not the only one. Still there is a memory of your father, the first time I met him, which always I have held back, and if I remember nothing else I remember that.

A sweating silence followed, and some new hours of forgetting, and then she said, And I remember a bear, and also a cub crying for its mother.

I took that cub, she said, and as I carried it from a cave I used my mouth to peel off its softest fur, clump by clump.

What the foundling told me last: That when he left, my wife still remembered my name.

That she remembered at least that, if she remembered nothing else.

That she said my true name to the foundling. That she whispered its two syllables into his ear against the curve of his collarbone. That she breathed me onto his skin, gave him all the sympathetic memories she had left, so he would not be afraid as he had been, as I had made him to be.

With a final kiss, she said, I wish I would remember you after you are gone, and then she sent him away, sent him as an orphan into the world she had made—as the orphan he would become, if I would not take him in, or if I was no longer alive—and then for a while he was alone in the world, a best-loved son unremembered, climbing upward through those many miles of smoldered spires, their crumbling structures sloping in. And as he’d climbed he took into himself the miles of scorched stairs and hollowed halls, that mimicry of his mother’s own interior landscape, that palace of her I had wrecked and ruined, and now with this telling he meant to give me what he had carried, so that I might be forced to carry it too.

FROM THE PILE OF CAST-OFF furs beside the house, I chose the cleanest strips to replace the dirty dressing around my ruined ankle, my trap-clubbed foot, and then I washed my face in a bucket of salt water, my hair in the same. As I moved around the outside of the house I kept my eyes on the tree line, nervous that the bear might appear there. I had not seen her since the day we fought in the woods, that same day she gave me the fur her son had once been buried inside, kept still in the satchel slung often around my body, which contained also the near-identical fur I had taken from the deep house, the only object pulled from my fire. Now I again removed the two furs from that satchel, tried to remember which was real and which only sung, and when I could not I told myself that it could not matter, this slim difference between the memory and the thing remembered.

At the most crimson hour of the dusk, I led the foundling down to the cold shores of the lake, where I put him into the rowboat and then rowed us out upon the water. As I fished for our dinner I wondered aloud if the foundling had the same strength of voice his mother had, if he could tear down the last stars, invisible behind the light of his mother’s moon—or else could he buoy that red shape back up into the sagging sky, almost broken then? Since the foundling’s return more cracks had appeared across the bowl of the sky, and now all the visible sky was fractured, streaked with more stuck lightning, those sights emitting their accompanying hummings and buzzings and long low thunders, and I asked him if he knew what would happen next, if his mother had told him what we should do.

But no matter what I said, the foundling said nothing in return, only sometimes shook his head or shrugged, stared off across the water. Now it seemed impossible to recall the face he had worn before, when last he was meant to be my son: Whatever song his mother had used to take him from cub to boy had perhaps blocked his progress from boy to adult, and I wondered if this could be set right, if there was some other song his mother could sing that would unbind him.

When next he lifted his eyes to mine, I pointed to the sky, and I said, Do you know what the red moon means? Or what happens next?

I said, Are you scared?

I said, In the morning we will go back. We will find your mother, and if we can help her, then we will.

The foundling still did not speak, only stared at me with his changeless face, the constellation of his eyes only two points, a single line, and yet what story I saw there, answering even without his speech to guide me: That he missed her. That if we could not find her again it might be a kindness, as he would be able to hope forever that she was not dead.

And then again I was jealous of what he had that I did not, and because I could not stop myself, I said, Everything you will lose when she dies, I have already lost.

It was the fingerling who broke the silence that followed, speaking for the first time since the night of his last attack, saying NO, saying NO again, saying THE BEAR IS COMING, THE BEAR IS COME, THE BEAR HAS COME AND SHE WAITS FOR YOU ON THE DIRT AND SHE WAITS FOR YOU IN THE HOUSE AND SHE WILL TAKE WHAT YOU HAVE KEPT FROM HER, AND THIS TIME I WILL NOT LET YOU DEFEAT HER, and what I heard also was not DEFEAT but DECEIVE, a choice perhaps, spoken in two voices.

I stopped my rowing, pulled the paddles up from the water, let the surface still around us. The air filled with our gray breath, and the shimmer of my wife’s moon seemed to waver from above, and though I could not see her I heard the bear roar from the dirt, and with that roar I saw more lightning crack across the sky, and also that the lightning already frozen there had begun to move, first slowly and then quickening, sparking red and green and blue-white across the inner sphere. The bear barked, then roared again—and in that roar I heard a new sound, a naming, and where had the bear learned such a thing—and then as the bear called the red moon’s name that moon began its fall, and as it burst the last skin of the sky it fractured, bursting into some innumerable flock of missiles, and each irregular shape ignited as it dropped through the atmosphere, and this time there was no wife-song, no other power waiting to save us.

THE FRACTURING MOON FELL THROUGH a cloud of sound, the racket of the sky’s awful cracking, and every part of the moon’s broken body arrived aflame, the first rough clumps to impact jolting the dirt into the air, and then the next wave concussed the already-broken ground, sending shock waves across the lake and also debris back toward the sky, great eruptions digging deeper craters. Above us the other moon snapped back upon the dazed ellipse of its orbit, suddenly brighter without competition, and as I watched it dance back into place I also saw how the sundered sky refused the dirt’s offering, so that soon gravity returned earth to earth, ten thousand handfuls of rock and sod falling upon the dirt and the lake, and for some time both the foundling and I had to crouch and cover our heads, to protect ourselves from the last moon rocks piling up in the bottom of the boat or else splashing loudly into the water around us.

When at last it was safe I stood and found my balance and looked toward the shore, through the swirling debris and dirt clouds, and there I was sure I spied some portion of the house still standing, set upon a promontory shoved up through the cracking of the earth. Behind it I saw the woods aflame, and from those woods came again the bear, her brutish shape emerging grotesque from the fire. I could not possibly have heard her above the loud discord of the dirt’s destruction, but when I saw her bared teeth and angry stance upon the shore I imagined her hoarsened sound calling across the lake, and then I lost sight of her in the confusion. A moment later I again thought I saw her fur-bare armor silhouetted against the fire, imagined the sizzle of exposed bone, that terrible pain issuing from her lungs. I watched for her where I could, but more than I wanted to know where she was, I wanted only for her to be gone, and then I saw her leaving, a blank shadow turning slowly in a sea of red flames, returning the way she had come, back into the blazing trees.

Lightning cracked above, true lightning not stuck but fresh and flashing, and the rain turned to downpour turned to storm, and upon the lake the salt water chopped, the surface rough where it had been the stillest. The foundling and I were tossed in our rowboat as I put the oars to the waves, pulled hard for shore, but we were too far out, and the water was too churned, and any begging for help I directed at the fingerling fell unanswered on his dumb lumps. Soon our route went wide of the right line to shore, and then I pounded my fists against my choked thighs, pleaded with that one son to help me save the other, regardless of their bad blood, the no blood between them, and then I roared too, until my tears and my noise frightened the foundling, frightened him as bad as the falling sky, the dark clots of flung-up dirt still crashing into the water all around, the shore collapsing into the lake even as we tried to reach it. The foundling screamed for me to stop as I screamed at the fingerling to do the same, until our voices were interrupted by the next disruption of the dirt, the second such shaking, and then some angry waves shook out across the surface of the lake, raising the rowboat high upon their crests, then dropping it down into unsteady furrows, where from its flat bottom we watched the water climb in high battlements above us, and when those battlements collapsed their cold contents filled the trough between with more water, caved wet walls crashing in.

THE EDGE OF THE OVERTURNING rowboat struck the foundling first and then me, knocking me somewhere in the back of the head or between the head and the neck, in some awkward place where I could not reach the injury, not while I kicked for the surface, and not afterward, while I struggled against the waves and searched the surface for the foundling. At last I saw him already heading toward the burning dirt, the house or house-hole remaining, and while I wanted to hurry after him I was not sure I could make it to the shore. I treaded water as best I could, but I tired fast with the drag of my new wound, and so I struggled only until his stroking form was small in the distance, close enough to shore that I could imagine his safe arrival, and then I did not try to follow.

Instead I made myself believe it was not just whale that inhabited our lake but another as well, the two connected by ghost, and for once the fingerling did not fight me but instead encouraged the story I was telling. At his suggestion I sank like a stone, like the stone of my heart, like the stone knife of the fingerling scraping at the walls of my heart, slashing toward escape, and in that passage into darkness something else shifted, for as I swam and sank and broke my chest to breathe I did not die, and around me the water seemed to be salt water no longer, not exactly, but instead both salt and water, and as I fell also again something thicker, more slippery, blacker even than the dark water, a sea of ink where once there was a lake of salt.

I threw myself ever lower, tunneled into the water at the fingerling’s command, this swimming motion almost all he knew from his short life, his too-quick float in his mother’s belly. All of me ached now, and still there was farther to go. I begged off, begged to rest, to quit, but then the fingerling spoke again, his heavy words dragging me down, forcing me under.

He said, IN THE WOMB, IF YOU STOPPED SWIMMING, THEN YOU DIED.

He said, ONCE, I THOUGHT THE WOMB WAS THE WORLD, AND THEN WHEN THAT WORLD REJECTED ME WHAT OTHER CHOICE EXISTED EXCEPT DROWNING, EXCEPT HOLDING MY BREATH UNTIL I BURST?

NOW DIVE, he said, and so I dove, swimming until I reached the bottom of the lake, but not the bottom of its center I had expected, only its center’s edge, its near shelf, the drop-off where the safe part of the water ended, the coolness below the burning surface above, where that band of cool fell down into colder darkness. On that shelf I leveraged myself lower, and also I felt the first floating strands of gunked eggs, unfertilized and untended and half gnawed, a thousand wasted babies, food for the silver faces of the lake’s fish, those blank expressions surrounding our dive, our pursuit into the thick black of the cloud below. I kicked deeper, drove our bodies down with the movement of my good leg and then my bad leg and then my good leg again, but despite my effort I did not make it to the center of the lake alone or even alone with the fingerling.

I could not have, not even before my crushed ankle or my other newest injury.

Now I knew that what still lived in the lake had many names and shapes but was then best titled squid, and although the bear thought it dead it was not exactly, and after its long-lashing reach hooked my skin I thought I would drown, but no, I did not die, not then.

HE COMES, said the fingerling, HE COMES AND HE IS YOU AND YOU ARE HIM AND NOW AT LAST YOU ARE BOTH HERE TOGETHER, and the fingerling’s voice was a hissing threat but also quieter than any other time of late, a hush that made me more afraid, and I felt him withdraw into his stomach-pit, and then the lake’s giant squid struck, reached out from the black beneath the lake to wrap me in its rough-puckered tentacles, to slash my skin with their barbed hooks.

I exhaled a scream of bubbled air, struggled to free myself even as the squid bid me to be still, fixing me with one huge eye and then the other. After some time the squid began to speak as the bear spoke, in an old language translated by the fingerling, its tentacle-shrouded beak snapping close to my face, saying that there was more to the making of a child—of a family—than just two bodies, than two bodies and an empty set of rooms.

It said, I AM LIKE YOU, BUT I AM NOT YOU, and when its voice thrashed against the sides of my skull I knew it was no real squid, only a ghost in the shape of a squid, and in my drowning I believed I smiled, and even in my stomach the fingerling laughed, as if ghosts were no danger, as if ghosts and their memories had not been the whole of our undoing.

The squid-ghost circled me in the floating blackness, and as it circled it spoke, and with words barely words, it said, YOU SEEK TO MAKE ONLY A CHILD, ONLY A HANDFUL OF CHILDREN, BUT I WANT MORE.

It said, YOU HAVE SEEN THE EGGS I KEEP, THE EGGS I TOOK FROM MY WIFE WHEN LAST SHE SWAM IN HER FIRST SHAPE.

It said, THEY ARE LESS NOW, BUT THEY ARE STILL MINE, AND STILL THEY ARE IN NEED OF A GOOD FATHER, and then it sprayed wide clouds of useless ghost semen and blackest ink, twin excretions fogging the deep lake.

It said, WHAT YOUR WIFE CANNOT MAKE, MINE ONCE REFUSED ME.

It said, AFTERWARD, I TRIED TO KILL MY WIFE AS YOU TRIED TO KILL YOURS, BUT I COULD NOT SUCCEED AS YOU HAVE, and as it said this I shook, because despite the fall of her moon I did not believe my wife was dead. And then the squid spoke again, said, KILL HER FOR ME, its tentacles drawing me close, the hard shell of its body long against me, and against its grip I shook my head, struggled again to escape.

KILL THE BEAR, the squid said. MAKE FRESH THIS WORLD ONCE AGAIN.

After I refused its offer, the squid opened my skin with its hooks and slammed its snapping beak into my chest, and even though the squid was a ghost, still it was powerful there in the lake-black: With sharp movements, it set to folding back the sheets of my skin, splitting some numbers of ribs and also the tissues between. It pushed forward, and my body bulged to accommodate its entrance, its puke-yellow eyes leading the strange wedge of its alien face, and then I was speared upon its sharp ridges, and then the fingerling was pushing back from all his holdings, and between them or upon them I was caught fast and screaming, thrashing against the squid’s attack, its refusal to accept my declining of its barely bartered truce, and for a while we spiraled deeper into the depths of the lake, a black made of the squid’s ink and also something else, where there was no sound and sight, where even our battle was subsumed into the silence, and where I burst against the cold and the dark until I was reduced to a held breath, a bit of bodily heat, a movement slowed and almost stopped. Still the squid-ghost swam on, not farther down but farther in, into me, trying to squirm its ghost into the spaces I contained, that space that in me was already filled with my own fractured haunts, my cancer-son, and would admit no other.

The squid’s shape was so heavy, so thick with ropes of ink now pushing into me too, and as I dropped through that black I dreamed a squid’s dream: I had not one child but thousands, all same faced as me, all hatching out of the lake at once, from both the egg clutch along the shelf ridge and also somehow from out of my arms, out of my legs, from out of my mouth and ears and nose, all little stars bright with tentacles and sharp black mouths, all floating upward toward the light.

The weight of the squid weighed upon me, and as I watched my dream-children swim off I sank deeper into their making, and in this dream I saw my life did not end with my death but rather went on, spread wide across the face of the world, my children a country of men and squid, so that everywhere there was lake we were there, and everywhere there was dirt there was a man sent to build his house upon it.

Throughout our fall the fingerling fought the squid from every inner space, pushed back with his many tumors, and soon the squid balked, struggled to withdraw, wriggling its barbs backward. Outside my body again, the squid swam long curves around my sinking weight, its angry shape first invisible in the black, its voice now lower than words, untranslatable even by the fingerling, and then again it was upon us, slashing with beak and claw, and as we fell, the depth’s pressure squeezed my lungs until they broke further, filled with ink, burst again.

How tired I was of almost dying, of suffering the sequenced steps without release: Here was the cold, the dark, the black, all around me and inside, and here was my crooked foot and my dented head or neck and all the rest of my hook-scraped and beak-burst body, and still I did not give in, still some part of me scratched forward, succored for life, for even what sorry life I had waiting. I reached into my boot for my blade, my knife dulled with decades of skinning and scaling, and as I drowned deeper I fought back, put the single sharp edge of my blade against the squid’s soft shell, and together we sank through another fathom of struggle before it tried again to whip me toward the crook of its stained beak, before I raked my knife across one tentacle and then the other, before I plunged it toward the squid’s eye—that eyeball alone the size of my head—and in the dark I moved the knife into the black at the center of its glimmering iris, into and then through that ring of light, pushing the knife so deep my wrist disappeared into the shell behind, and somewhere within the knife finally caught, then wrenched from my grip in a wet squelch of ichor—and still I knew I had not ended the squid, what ghost remained of this once-father.

Not to have killed it but to have at least made half of it dark.

To have at least made that half black, blacker, and then to have that part and others broken, made a scrim swimming all around me, a body floating like a shroud.

MEMORY AGAIN AS TRANSFORMATION, AS transfiguration: to swim or else float or fall inside the tearing-apart, to be joined with this squid-thing, this whale-thing, this desperation that could be either a squid or a whale, that in one of its shapes the bear had ended. And still it went on, and amid my dispersal swam the squid’s anger, its own remainder, fury at how it could not enter my cavity, and if it could not claim the inner chambers of my body, at least it could reshape the shell.

The fingerling was already familiar with this squid’s motion, swimming and tentacled and inky black, and I was made that swimmer’s shape too, and soon my breathing stopped being one kind and became another, and by that change I finally came to believe what I had been told: that despite our too-many numbers there were always only two, and that those two begat no true offspring, because it was always the same two that appeared, in this and in every age, and yet everywhere on this dirt there were too many.

AFTERWARD, WHAT OTHER POWER LED me up through the shallower lake, what glowing guide except the light of the moon? Not my wife’s moon, shattered and fallen, but that other again made lonely above the earth, its long light cutting even the ink-water of the new lake, making floating ribbons shimmering around this new body, shorn and reshaped, this face different now beneath the water than it had been above.

As I ascended, the fingerling taught me the motions this shape necessitated, the jetting this way and that, choosing a path zigzagged upward through the layers of coldest and then colder and then just cold. For a long time, he urged me to stay away from the surface, but I did not understand his hesitance until after I burst the plane between salted ink and rain-soaked air: Beneath the water I would always be squid, would take on the role hollowed out for me by the long-ago aggression of the bear, but above I would for some time longer be only myself, only failed husband, broken father.

At first I waited there, tried to be both, to have both, but the fingerling denied me, pushed me to pick. NO, he said. YOU CANNOT ALWAYS WANT TO HAVE EVERYTHING.

Diving back through the lake, I snatched at schools of fish and passing eels, feastings for me and my son, and as my new shape swelled, the fingerling swam within me; his shapes changed too, constrained by my shifting, and for some time we moved together, and after our hungers were satisfied I began our gradual shearing of the surface, and when we broke again the plane of the lake’s surface it was to find the rain softened, the wind reduced, the waves manageable even in the dark, the first true dark in many years. From the surface I searched the shoreline with my human eyes, then as the squid I dove below to swim in toward the shallows, on the way checking the shelf and what lay between the shelf and the shore for any sign of the foundling, finding none except some scent of his blood, some taste of his vomit, and also of salt and fish and bile reduced, traces I imagined discernible only to my new and watery senses.

And then for a moment not to care so much about the foundling, at least not the foundling as a boy, which was not the shape of son my new shape craved.

And then to want to swim back into the depths, the deep and deeper lakes where my body would stay as perfect as any other swimming creature’s, at last ideal for what activities I would put it to, evolved right.

All I had to do was choose the lake over the land forever, and then I could be a new thing, a squid first and a whale after, and for a moment I knew how the one who came before me had arrived at his station, and also what he had traded to claim it.

And how sorely I was tempted, ready then to return to whatever waters, to linger in the naked dark with the black and inky salt around my ruined ankles, as I did after I first stood into the cold air, watching the squidness slip free of my body—but it was only by choosing the land that I could choose my wife, and so what other choice could I make, what else but to once more become a man.