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.