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

4

THOSE DAMNED AND CLOCKLESS HOURS. Those unrecordable days, their tricky times, unable to be measured or even to have their passing discerned, and still some events did happen, still some progressions ran onward, unchecked and uncontrolled: Now the dirt crawled with flames, hot tongues licking that old star-glass, melting some into a form again slippery, still malleable and undetermined as I walked ashore, carrying the shape of a squid inside me, and also the many bodies of the fingerling, who I knew had neither forgiven me nor given up his vengeance. The rain continued to fall upon us as it had before, but no longer was there as much lightning and thunder in the air, and I wondered, How long had I been beneath the water, if that storm had passed, and how would I ever know?

In the distance—up the path from the lake, up the opened hill—there I saw the ruins of our house, barely rooms, barely chimney. The moonfall had cracked its foundations and cratered the rest, and I had to step lightly across our now-treacherous yard and our rubbled sitting room to find a sure path to traverse, some way to reach the center of the house, where our rooms now fell away into the earth. I crawled out toward the edge on my hands and knees, then looked downward from that precipice into the dirt, into the rooms and hallways exposed below. That first level was damaged too, its chambers cluttered with the house’s fallen furnishings, those dishes and furs and furniture, but from my vantage that sung floor still seemed more whole than the house I had built, and perhaps safe enough to enter, as I still planned.

From there I walked out of the house and then searched all around the cracked crater where the largest portions of the moon had fallen, but along its circumference I saw no good signs: On the lake side of the crater there was ink staining the soil and the water, and opposite that there was only the burned earth and ash-trees where the woods had farthest reached, and none of its animals were left where I could see them, if left at all. Occasionally I found the melted steel of some trap, and between its snapped jaws nothing remained, the fire having immolated what could not run, and no matter how many laps I made there was still no sign of the foundling, whom I had last sensed in the water, and there only faintly. Of all the elements of our world, it was mostly the woods that resisted the cooling of the falling rain, and there the clouds of ash and smoke and falling branches still thickened, so that all I could hear was the crackle of flames, the dropping of deadening limbs. Among the trees the sensed world shrunk, became some few feet of touch and taste, all dark, all ash, reddish-brown and brownish-red. There I called the foundling’s name, and then that confused air entered my lungs, made me hack and cough, put bright flecks across my vision, and still I tried to hold right the path toward my memory of the cave, a path straightened by fire and missing trees, by the removal of all the brush and thorny bramble that had thwarted my last attempt to find its entrance.

And still I was lost, still I could not find what I was looking for, until again the fingerling pointed the way, turned my steps toward what he must have somehow known we would find: the entrance to the cave, and then the foundling found again, just inside that smoke-filled hole; found trying to reach one mother or another by a path less-often taken, as if all caves led to the same chambers; found by stumbling over his stilled form, my feet tangling across his empty shape to send me sprawling.

Memory as discovery of this almost son of mine, of the body: To scramble back to standing, and then to return to my knees to dig the foundling’s shape from the cave floor, from what ash had already blanketed his form.

To uncover with my fingers the absence of breath, of speech or movement, and to put my hands to his chest, to push and pump and pry but to be able to add no breath or heartbeat, as he had so recently added mine to me.

To wipe away the silt and wonder again how long I had been gone, and where else the foundling had wandered before reaching the cave.

To taste what came out of his mouth and to find not life but ash and more silt, the gray stuff of his suffocation.

To cradle his body against mine and then to stand with his limp heaviness hung upon my frame.

To have forgotten the weight of a child and to regret the forgetting—but then to never forget what happened next, how it felt when my fingers discovered the wounds upon his back, the teeth marks splitting the skull, and to understand it was not the thicker air that killed the foundling but his mother the bear.

THE FIRE WAS MOSTLY EXTINGUISHED by the time we emerged from the cave, although its effect remained in its additions of ash and char, and also its reductions, its destructions of leaf and needle, of fowl and flora. When I reached the tree line I saw the dirt was no less changed, the air warmer than before, and as I watched, a soft rain continued to fall in some places, although not in all. The weather—which had for so long been only one state—was not yet righted, and various kinds of precipitation fell upon me as I carried the foundling toward the crater’s edge, toward the cracked and broken house that hung above.

Between my steps aftershocks shook the ground, nearly rocked me from my feet, belied any delusions of safety I might have harbored now that the fire was gone, now that the sky’s ashy gradient moved quickly toward a more recognizable hue of gray. I advanced upon the ruins of the house, which despite its rearrangement remained mostly where I had built it: All my past steps were easily remembered, and those were the paths that led me home that day, with the foundling in my arms, the fingerling mad with happiness at his false brother’s new lack of everything, his body empty of all that life the fingerling had once begrudged.

All that remained was the shape my wife had given him, the body of a boy, the face that was my wife’s face, if she had been a boy herself, and how it wrenched me to look upon those features. My wife had sent the foundling into my care, and I had failed her, and for that I was sorry, and for that I would descend again the deep house so that I might reach the great stairs at its bottom, that deeper house that spiraled and soared below, and I tried to convince myself that this time I would walk those steps down into the black, through that last element and then beyond, into whatever deepest house was built there, the chamber in which my wife or else the body of my wife had so long been waiting.

THE WALLS ANGLED INWARD UPON their foundations, with only the brought brick of the chimney still mostly upright, and the rest of the house swayed, its creaking caught in the inconsistent gales that blew across the dirt. From there the path into the house was not the path I had previously taken but some other raised walkway left solid or nearly solid as the ground around it had crumbled, exposing the first levels of the deep house even as their rubble filled the empty rooms within, burying some number of the scorched stone floors. I did not look down more than I had to, and in any case the carried foundling made it hard to see where I placed my feet, and with each step the fingerling continued to cry, WHY BOTHER, WHY BOTHER, WHY BOTHER. Where before he’d had to swim from muscle to muscle, from gland to organ and back again, now his presence was persistent, his movements known everywhere always, as soft lumps between the thin bones of my hand, as more-fibered protuberances upon my femur and my clavicle. My stomach, his first home, swelled with him, so that when I pissed and shat his sign was there too, in thick dark blood, in veiny clods that dislodged only when I pushed and pushed. One of my eyes now failed intermittently, alternated cloudy and dark and starry and clear, and in this too I sensed his doing, just as I did in the ringing tinnitus of my ears and the crackle of my arthritis. Always now the fingerling made himself known, as perhaps I made myself known inside him, long ago, when I had inserted a fragment of myself into the egg, the vessel of his first long float, and if half the fingerling was made of some half of me, so now half of me was made of the same proportion of him, a weight balanced inside a weight.

Or else it was only old age that I felt. And here was the proof I would not live forever, as always I’d imagined I would.

The wall near our front door held mostly solid, but others were punched through by the bear, her blows driven by that powerful hump upon her shoulders, or else ripped off their studs by moon rock and quake debris, and also singed by fire, by unstuck lightning. Even the parts of the house that had suffered no direct damage were wind worn, weather sick, and I stepped carefully across the floors as I carried the foundling’s wet and filthy body into the house, lifting him through the wreckage of tables and chairs, of pots scattered and utensils flung against and sometimes through walls.

Around us the house sighed and swayed, wood groaning against grain, and above us the sky continued its sucking sound, slower now but still wheezing against the tear the moonfall had made. I carried the foundling across the wrong-angled floors and into our bedroom, where upon the bed were still the sheets where my wife and I had once lain in the hopes of making our own children, and now those lengths and widths of fabric became instead a shroud: I wrapped the foundling in that once-white cloth, given to us on the day of our wedding, and as I locked the fabric with careful folds I remembered all of those wedding guests—my parents, the parents of my wife, our uncles and aunts and cousins and brothers and sisters, our friends when we still had friends—and for the first time I thought how they were surely mostly dead, passed away without our notice, lost twice to us because we were too far away to see or hear enough to grieve, too isolated to have any community to share with us its news. We had come to a place where all we could see was ourselves and also each other, and I had almost forgotten that there were ever others, others besides my wife and me, our fingerling and our foundling, the bear and the squid and the smaller lives over which they ruled.

I had seen in the deep house my wife’s memories of her parents—of what one parent had done to the other—but also of what good people they had seemed before. I had no best memories of my own family, had always stood separate from those who were meant to stay close to me, whom I was meant to stay close to, and now maybe they were all dust, and only I was still alive. Everywhere I went I remained, and going with me was only the fingerling nested within, and also the dead foundling, this son to carry downward, inside, and through some fire-wrecked memory, that lost reminder of our lives as they were at the last moment of our shared past.

Only when the foundling was right-shrouded did I leave his side, and then merely to seek some pair of breeches, an old shirt my wife had sewn, plus my spare pair of boots, one-half of which I had to cut to fit my mangled foot. I gathered supplies for making light and fire, then an older knife, not my skinning blade lost in the lake but one meant for cooking, last used for the removal of fish tumors, and I packed my satchel with the two furs, the foundling’s first skin and the twitching memory of it, and also my watch, that gift which I had not worn since it stopped working long before, during my previous descent. These were all the possessions I thought I needed, all I still cared to have with me, and if other objects in that house had once held meaning then they no longer did, not for me.

The house I had built was at first small, just a few rooms, a small number of windows, a single hallway and a very finite and planned-for number of doors, and all of that was still there, if also dashed apart. After I finished my preparations I walked that first house once more, examined again its remains, peered through its broken walls and windows at the dirt beyond, and everywhere I looked I saw only some element I had been cured of wanting, and as I examined the future of this world I found I no longer craved its ownership. Now I would leave it behind to again journey beneath the earth, to again search out my wife—and whether I found her or not I thought perhaps I would never return to this dirt where we had lived, nor any of the lands beyond it.

Below the limits of the house, I knew my wife’s nested structure was far greater, extending even past what I had seen on my last descent. Surely the bear already roamed somewhere among those rooms, waiting between the surface and the great stairs, mad with what she had done, what I was sure she would claim I’d made her do. Soon I would be on my way to meet her, and when I did it would be with the shrouded death of her cub in my arms, with the skins of his first-meant childhood strapped to my back, and I did not yet know what I would say when next we met.

And how I would have to be ready.

And how when I lifted the foundling into my arms, the fingerling objected, saying, OR JUST THROW IT IN THE LAKE.

And how I never would be ready.

ABANDON IT IN THE WOODS OR IN THE GARDEN OR IN THE ROOMS OF THE HOUSE.

And how I had never known what right thing to say or do, to her or to anyone else.

I DO NOT CARE WHERE YOU LEAVE IT, he said. BUT DO ANYTHING BUT BRING IT ALONG.

And how when that meeting came I would speak and act anyway, as always I had done before.

EVERYWHERE THERE WAS THE CHAR and charcoal of our ruined wedding presents, of the memory of them, and also pools of rainwater and clods of sod and fallen walls and piled rubble. I picked through those first unceilinged rooms, then the darker halls below, curious for what remained, but so little held any useful shape or other dimension that soon we moved on, downward and farther in, through room after room, and though I did not forget their contents I also did not linger long between their walls.

And in this room, a silence that had once been a song.

And in this room, a light that had once been lightning.

And in this room, a heat that had once been a fire.

And in this room, a lump of silver that had once been a ring, two rings.

And in this room, the taste of burned hair. And in this room, its smell.

And in this room, the carapaces of bees, long ago emptied.

And in this room, a wine bottle, full of the leavings of maggots but not maggots.

And in this room, a broken bowl of mirrors, reflecting nothing.

And in this room, a filthy red ribbon, for putting up a woman’s hair, for tying it back.

And in this room, unwashed seeds split by fire, revealing the expectant sprouts inside, now doomed and dried.

And in this room, a sensation like the slight give of a bruised thigh, when pushed in upon by a thumb.

And in this room, a sound that might have been my wife’s voice, just too far off to hear.

And in this room, a chunk of moon rock, still hot, and above it a shaft of light lifting five stories to a jagged hole in the surface, to the other moon’s light pouring down.

And in this room, the spokes of a bassinet, a blanket buried beneath a caved-in ceiling.

And in this room, a trowel stained dark, used once for digging twice.

And in this room, a rag, brown with blood, with layers of old blood.

And in this room, the sound of a star hitting the earth.

And in this room, the louder sound of a moon, of part of a moon.

And in this room, a staleness of spilt milk.

And in this room, the slime and the scales of rotted fish.

And in this room, the broken body of a deer, twisted upon itself, legs over head and around antlers, and some of the rest wrenched free for feed.

And in this room, a heavy line arced in the ash, acrid urine, another marker that the bear had raced ahead, and in the next room a runny shit, fresh from her body, and how I shivered to see it, to smell it stinking still.

And in this room, somehow a baby rabbit, alive, shaking in its fur. It had perhaps come into the deep house during the firestorm above, and now it was near death, with no mother to care for it and no food to find. I was hungry too, and just as lonely, and as I picked up the trembling bunny, I wondered if I had it in me to end early one of this world’s last things, so that I might go on a little longer.

I wondered, and as I wondered I stroked away the rabbit’s shivers, and then I wondered no more.

And in the next deepest room, only ash.

And in the room after that, only more of the same.

And then ash in the next room and in the next room and in the next, all rooms filled with ash and smoke-marred stones still radiating heat or else steaming with water falling through cracked ceilings, through ruptured floors, and throughout that descent the fingerling kept silent his counsel, spent his energies tormenting my body instead of my mind, seizing new stations as I slept in slanted doorways and damp hallways. Then visions of battle all night. Then one morning waking to find my right leg paralyzed straight, the muscles needed to flex it away from its numb position unresponsive even as I felt some ineffective ghost kicking, some shade of the right movement. As I kneaded the muscles and cursed my stubborn son, I felt the silent smirk of his faceless form move, and I stopped my massaging to punch his shapes, not caring that I would only bruise the surface of my stomach and thighs, never harming his holdings beneath.

Let my leg go or do not, I said. I will go on no matter what you do, no matter how it might hurt.

The fingerling did not respond, only let me struggle, believing he could convince me to abandon my last charge, the foundling’s body. But I would not and said as much: If I could not have carried the foundling, then I would have dragged him in his sheets, would have crawled the burned wreckage to search out enough wood to make a sledge on which to haul him down the stairs. I sat on the ground, driving my thumbs through my thick trousers, the spotted skin beneath, rubbing the prickling pain from my muscles, and as I fought nerve by nerve against the fingerling he bragged again about how he would one day take control, and that once he did my mind would be reduced to his former role, a prisoner pushed down, a belly-holed secret, wished forgotten. He would take my body and with it he would live his own life, in the house or on the dirt, among the trees of the woods or under the waters of the lake.

I had been given so many new bodies, he said, and one day he planned to rule them all.

MEMORY AS SADNESS DISCARDED, DENIED: To pretend to be unaffected by the almost-emptied rooms of the deep house. To pretend to have some other reasons to open again every door, scour every chamber, even after I knew what I would find, and so to lie to the fingerling, to claim I was looking for my wife, even though we both knew she was not there.

To claim to be hunting for the bear, even though as always she would find us, and not the other way around.

To be overcome at the tenth floor, then nearly emptied of reaction by the twentieth, and still to have a hundred more floors to walk, staircases to climb.

To eat what I could find, the cinders of the feast the foundling had claimed were always there, that I had not remembered, that I had believed poisoned, trapped as I would have trapped them.

To drink water fallen clean from the sky, now mixed black with what was once us, what were once the memories of my wife.

To again rub ashes into my face until my pores and ducts choked shut with my wife, so that I could not cry, so that my expressions were blanked by her absence.

And then in that state to reach the landing where my last descent had ended, that terminus jutted out from the last hall into the darkness surrounding, spread over the black that lay below, swirling around the spiral of the great stairs.

After the long walk trapped in the burned house there was some relief to again taste the better air of that wider chamber, but also some fear, because my failing eyesight could not penetrate the dark below or around, nor could my ringing ears locate the source of the cool wind that blew across the unbounded expanse. Rather than proceed immediately across the landing and onto the stairs, I stayed close to the last door of the deep house, lingered there until I believed myself ready. After some hesitation I approached the great stairs, and there I reached out my good foot to place it upon the first stair—and then I stumbled unbalanced upon my bad foot, nearly falling when I would not take that step—and how the fingerling laughed then, at my flaws again revealed.

The temperature dropped until I shivered constantly in my last clothes and in my tired bones, and then the fingerling lapsed quiet, his voice chilled, and so for a time he tormented me no more, let off his bragging, and rightly so: He had won much of what he’d stood to win, and what good had it done him? His rival the foundling was dead, and we were on our way to find his mother. And if she was dead too? Then even that might be no bother, as she was not the end of mothering, not even in this long-wearied world. Somewhere above or below there was the bear, hunting her way through the house, a danger, yes, but also another mother to whom the fingerling could be given, offered in replacement for her silenced cub—but then the bear was also more than one element, bear and mother, a combination we rarely spoke of, barely mentioned.

From below darkness leaked, and black too, had since before we first arrived at the landing, and soon the cold and the exhaustion of my long descent overwhelmed me, until there was no choice but to give more control to the fingerling, so that while I rested he might watch the stairs above. I instructed him to wake me at the first sign, and then I asked for his worthless promise, begged him to make no bargains of his own, for it was his mother he wanted, not this other who wanted his mother dead.

Before I slept I begged him to be no one else’s foundling, and in the last moment of wakefulness I knew my mistake, how I had said too much: He had never before considered that there was more than one way to find a mother, more than one route to becoming a son, and now he said, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CUB AND A BOY?

He said, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE TO ME?

BUT LATER THE FINGERLING DID cry me from my sleep, as he spoke loud in all his many voices, each new tongue battering me up into wakefulness. How long had I slept? Long enough that my first movements caused my beard to spill nested spiders down my chest, their pale bodies scurrying across and into my clothes, and as I shook them from those folds, my sight cataracted, firing white points across the dark of the landing, and from too close the bear roared so that I hurried to push muscles against my rusty joints, made them to lift me from the ground, to point my beggar’s bones in the direction of her approach. At my feet lay her shrouded son, smaller now, the sad shell of a departed ghost, and there would be no hiding his shape. I wet my throat with swallowed spit, and when the bear appeared—that bony armor, gathered across that muscled hump; that yellow mouth, set slavering in that wide-wedged head—even before she was fully emerged from the stairwell I began to speak, as fast and loud as I could.

With dream still slipping from my syllables, I said to the bear, My wife’s songs have torn down the sky, have dug this deep house, have thrown moons up and dragged stars down, and I know you know these powers and of others besides.

I said, I know that you were once mighty too, but my wife has another song, one with the power to do what your music cannot. With this song my wife can restore your child, can find and bind the ghost of your cub to this boy, and then make him again into the bear he was always meant by you to be.

This is why I seek her, why I have waited here for you, where you might help me reach her.

I said, I know you killed your cub, shaped into our shape, and I know your misery must be absolute—absolute as your anger has always been.

I said, I do not know why you did it, but with my wife’s help it can be undone.

I said these things, and then the bear roared, the force staggering me, and as she started her approach I spoke faster, finished what few words I had left to say—and I am sorry to say I said them—that when the bear’s son was made whole again, then I would end my wife, as long ago I promised the bear I would.

I said, In return, you will make me be a bear too. You will breathe fur upon my skin and upon the skin of your son.

I said, We will be a family of bears, and you shall be its head forever.

But bears take no mates, marry no one. What children they have, they belong to mothers alone, and how little mother there was left to receive my words, the words I hoped were like those she wanted to hear, if there even were such words: Her bones remained long and thicker than ever, but as I had seen from the lake there was no fur atop her face or shoulders or flanks, barely even flesh where fur should have been. If her claws had pulled from her paws then it hardly mattered, because covering her everywhere were sharp points, spurs of bone come to replace those previous implements. Her eyes spun wide in the hollows of their orbits, and she seemed able to fix me only with one pupil or the other, never both at once, and while her wounded gaze shook me, it did not make me move my own hurt face away. Despite the rank rot of her speech, I stood fast before her, and as I watched the muscles move atop her murdering face I put between us another truth so that I might armor my lie within it: Before the falling of the moon, I said, I had been dead upon the floor of our house, heart stopped, and the foundling had sung me back into life—and this the bear did not want to hear.

The bear covered the last distance between us in a bound, knocking me to the stones with the slap of an uncurling fist. The foundling’s shrouded body was beneath her and between us, and she stepped carefully around it even as she pressed the weight of her paw upon my chest. My ribs strained, and for a time my breath fled, and with wheezing growls she berated my deceptions, my dishonest intentions in all the moments from the first we shared upon the dirt until this one. Still I persisted in my story, kept to what had happened: I had been dead, and the foundling had given me life.

In the woods I had buried so many animals, and while I had seen what later fled up and out of their graves, I knew that what the bear had to offer was not new life but only some portion of the old come back, a portion subtracted from a better whole and never to be fixed again. And so I convinced her that the founding had learned this trick from his other mother, my wife, that there was a song that brought the human dead back to life, and only my wife and her foundling knew it. Not me, with my tone-deaf ears, and not the bear, with her language of barks and growls. Only working together would we see my wife again, and only together would we each get what we wanted.

The bear roared, and in her roar she said, All our pacts have been nullified, revoked.

After my cub is restored to me, then I will kill the thief for what she took from me, for what that taking cost.

After your wife is dead, then I will take my new cub and return to the woods, the woods that will grow where my woods once grew.

You I do not want. You will leave this place forever, returning to the country across the lake, and if ever I smell your scent again I will separate it from your skin with every tooth and claw I have left.

She said, I did not mean to kill my cub, but in the darkness and the fire his shadow grew long, and when I saw its length spread across the wall of my cave then I mistook him for you, clothed as he was in your stinking clothes.

THE BEAR LOWERED HERSELF BEFORE me, all her remainder shaking with the containment of her rage. I struggled aboard her broad shoulders with the foundling clutched to my chest, and the bear’s armor cut my thighs as I tried to find some right place to saddle myself, and so each movement made a wound, and each wound itched and burned, and the burning bled the last sleep out of my legs, the body above.

The fingerling argued against my revealed plan, claiming that what had been impossible was made easy: Now there was a gap in the bear’s armor between its head and its torso, a space where two plates of bone ground with each step, where my blade might slip between to spill her out, no longer having to saw through the layers of hair and skin and fat that once blocked entrance to the bear’s jugular, its carotid.

The fingerling said, THIS TRUCE I CANNOT ALLOW, but by then it was too late, and the bear started down the great stairs with switch-backed bounds, plummeting from left to right of the fast-dropping spiral, and with my free hand I clutched at the sharp points of her shoulder blades, cried out as each leap cut me deeper, sawed at what little flesh was left.

The bear moved fast, and yet we seemed barely to advance, there being so many stairs above us, so many still dropping below. She leaped down the high and uneven steps, and while often she landed sure of foot she also sometimes stumbled, sliding sideways across the precarious stone of the steps. More than once I was nearly thrown from her shoulders, and each near fall left me shaken, clutching tight to all I needed to hold. At this depth, the walls around the stairs faded, and then sight and scent began to do the same, and even without the whole of those senses I perceived or believed I did that we were in a wide cave or carved chamber, farther bounded than any I’d experienced before. If there was sound at the edges of that space, then it did not reach us upon the stairs, and nothing flapped or flew or dripped through the yawning dark. Emptied of activity, the air thinned, and as we descended farther there was for a time only the bear’s footsteps, her harsh breathing, and also my own constant wheezing, some effect of age or injury I could no longer suppress, each of our base noises flatter without the possibility for resonance or echo.

As she navigated the great stairs, the bear’s growls of recognition turned again to speech and then to story, her heavy voice a tiring whisper, and through the fingerling she was translated and amplified, as she offered some last words into the grayer air where words could still be spoken.

The bear said, I do not know what you and your wife fled, but in my old country I no longer had any husband of my own. We had married and he had built a house, and then that house had burned, and then he had died in the fire, taking everything of him with him, and I had not even a child to remind me of him, only some wide scars of the burns I had suffered when I failed to save him, marks of what for some time I wished had consumed me too.

She said, Afterward I came to the dirt, but I did not build a house, did not know how, did not even want a house again, when houses had for me proved so temporary.

She said, From the first I lived in the cave, and in the day I walked the woods, picked its berries and dug its tubers, made for myself some simple life in which I owned nothing, in which I wanted for no other.

But there was already another here, she said, and he watched me, and later I felt him watching.

When I walked across the dirt, and then into the lake to wash myself and to swim in the cold gray water, there I found him waiting, and after he hushed away my reluctance he showed me many sights, both the surface of things and also what lay deeper beneath.

She said, It was he who showed me the black and also how to dive below it, first with him and then on my own.

It was there in the black that I changed for the first time, that I became some other shape than grieving woman, than widow bereft.

She said, I was not always a bear, but I was not before that just one other thing.

Neither was he, she said. He was both whale and squid, and once a man, once many men, perhaps.

He was so old when I met him, she said, but even in his old awfulness he could still be gentle, and in the lake-black our shapes did not matter, and so we were as one for a time, and the next time we separated I was two, one floating inside the other, and he was still his same multitude, his legion of possibility, a thousand shapes all wanting only to be made more, to be taken out of the lake and onto the dirt, then back into the other world, the country where what he was might spread.

All I wanted was one child, one boy to love, to take the place of the man I had lost, and when I saw I could not have just that then I hid his child inside me and refused all others, and with what strength he had taught me I kept him away until I could escape the black, the water above. Against his anger, I left the lake and went back to the woods, where I was sure he could not follow, and in my cave, among the dark shadows gathered between the world’s broad bones, there I saw that it was our children who gave us shape, as much as we shaped them, and for my coming child I became a bear, meant us both be bears forever, so that what human miseries I had known might never know him.

The light from the fires above had long faded, and the broken shafts of light falling from the surface could not reach this deep either, and now there was only darkness. Or rather, not darkness but the whole of that element that I had never experienced upon the dirt, with its moon and its moons, and only partially under the lake. Now here was the fullness of the black, the truth of that element undiluted and worse than I’d imagined. The black was thick in places and hot too, and also it was cold and thin at other depths, and whatever it was it was always there. Other senses failed too, so that sometimes I could not feel my skin, goosefleshed with chill or else sweating and bloody, nor could I any longer hear through the weight of the black’s silence. My tongue went numb, and the inside of my nose felt so full of silt that I could not clear it, and still the bear moved downward, still she bellowed soundlessly, as I felt her lungs fill and empty below my legs, when I felt anything at all.

Downward and downward she took us, navigating by something I could not sense, perhaps the smell of her cub’s last disguised passing, perhaps the scent of the woman who stole him away. I could not even see my fingers in front of my face, but I felt or else imagined that the way occasionally flattened, straightened, that we arrived at wide landings, at whole floors riddled with black passageways leading away from the stairs toward other black chambers. It was only there among those widest floors that the bear became confused, almost lost. There she had to put her bloody nose to the ground and sniff for her trail, and I wondered how much better even her weakened senses were that she could smell so much through the black when I could not, and if what confused her was not losing the trail but rather having it fracture, spreading in too many directions, for even though those passageways were as yet unlit they were not empty, and if they were like those above, then they might have held me, might have held my wife, and also the bear and the squid and the fingerling and the foundling, and I saw in the bear’s nosing of the stone floors that whereas the deep house had been mostly our past this deeper house could have been our future—but then that future was dark and cold, an emptied gulf where there was nothing to hear but silence, nothing to see but absence, nothing to own but our lack.

And then for some long span there was no light above and no light below, and no other senses either, and for a time no thought, only the black, the black and also us turning inward upon the stairs inside it, except for when I thought I saw what was once a star fall off in the distance, tunneling white-blazing through the senseless void, but surely I imagined the sights its light showed me, nightmares indescribable; and then even that blackest black, it could not go on forever, and although I did not mark when we began to emerge any more than I was sure when we had become fully immersed, there next came a returning of sensation, and with each step we descended, the black receded or was at last pushed back.

ONCE AGAIN I RECOGNIZED A graying of the air, some shelves of rocks jutting into sight, some cave walls closing in, and soon all these surfaces resolved into sight, wet with the moisture trapped under the earth, and that water dripped onto my face and my hands, waking my body from its stasis, the senseless sleep of our descent. Now there was no more hibernation, only a thousand small and vulgar pains: My thighs ached with the movement of the bear’s bony plates, and my teeth shook in their sockets as I tested them with my tongue, that stiff organ suddenly dry and aching. I lifted my face, opened my mouth to let the moisture drip into me, each drop cooling some tiny fraction of the sore heat in my throat, and with light returning it was easier to see how blind I was going, had gone, how my one bad eye had become two. Soon I would see nothing at all, and I began to worry that I would arrive too late, that in her chambers I would not be able to look upon the wife I had come so far to find.

We were again upon a structure recognizable as a staircase, with a ceiling and a floor and walls close and closing in. Now there was the darker black above us and a lighter light below, and I felt my heart race forward, accelerating to let a rare bit of excited blood pass through its clogged valves and pumps, that fist of red muscle shaking anew, thudding my bones, setting their chorus to vibrating, and from inside that feeling I said, Hurry, I said, Hurry to the bottom now—

At the sound of my voice, the bear slipped, staggered, the front of her body lower than the back and now sliding sideways, and as I tightened my grip on the pommel of a protruding shoulder blade, the bone shattered, became a handful of dust. The bear cried out, bent the wide wedge of her head back upon me, and she was near blind then too, one eye clouded, the long-drooping other caked with layered rheum and salt, grinding as it turned in its orbit. She opened her mouth to make some warning, but there was so little growl left in her, too little to waste. Snot dripped from her caved nostrils, and the remains of her lips drooled white clumps of thirsty spit, and the cords in her neck jumped between her bones, so that I could see her stretched muscles working her toothless face, that countenance no less fearsome for its lack of skin, of underlying blood with which to make its hate known, and to that face I said, I am sorry.

I am sorry, I said.

I said, I am sorry, but still I must ask you to hurry.

How the bear hated me then, as I hated her: She stiffened beneath her bones, cast that hate’s heat through what shell she had left, and then again we were descending, and as our pace resumed and then exceeded its prior state, the fingerling pulsed in my belly, grew bold against my touch. How much of my territory he had acquired, and now he returned to me only what I did not want, some other sensations I had set aside: My liver throbbed with him, as did my lungs, my gall bladder, the bone in my thigh. In my stomach was the worst pain, the first of it ever and now still there, fibrous and hard. I poked at that first tumor with my fingers, pushed him floating through the nausea, then gasped at the new pains in my bowels and in my balls, at the bloating that followed the fingerling’s bulging against the walls of my organs, the inside of my abraded flesh, my hollowed skin.

The bear’s body tensed beneath her armor, bristled the plates of bones around her head to quivering, and though the fingerling and I joined in her agitation still I did not see what the bear saw.

The memory of our arrival at the foot of the world, at the bottom of everything: To reach the ending of the staircase to find a wall and in that wall a door, inset into the stone.

To climb off the bear, holding the shrouded foundling against one shoulder so that my other hand might be free.

To stand back as the bear threw herself upon the door, knocking her claw-bones against its locked strength.

To let her roar herself empty, then to unfasten the stained join of my shirt, pull free my secret: the key to our house, the key that had forever fit all the doors of my wife’s deep house, whenever I’d found them locked against me.

Then to put my palm against the cold stone of the door.

Then to push it wide and also to step through.

Then at last to understand: It was not a chamber my wife had built at the bottom of the great stairs but a house.

A house, and also a dirt, and also a lake, and also a woods.