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.