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.