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.
5
ADIRT, A WOODS, A LAKE, and all too close together, a miniature landscape surrounding a right-sized house: This was our land as we had first come to it, the place we had arrived newly married, childless but expectant. I had forgotten how bright those days had been, how sweet the air had smelled, but here those memories came rushing back, and even the dirt itself was moist and fragrant, readied for seed. But if the dirt had been made mostly right, still it seemed as if it was subordinate to the house, that shape rebuilt exactly as I remembered, and it seemed that instead of raising the house’s structure upon some preexisting plot, my wife had instead somehow started with its rooms, spinning them out of the black before spilling the lake and the woods and the dirt from within—and even at a glance it seemed obvious she had not finished. Despite the curve of sky above there was hanging upon it no sun and no stars and no moon, and so even the greenness of the trees and the blueness of the lake could not hide that we were at the bottom of a cave, a dome carved from beneath a blanket of blackness. I did not forget then, fought against being fooled, for in that moment I wanted all my senses, knew it was important that I not succumb to this illusion, and so I observed only what original elements I recognized, and also some of their smaller parts: In the window of my wife’s house there flickered the faintness of a gas-lamp, one nearly exhausted of fuel, and I thrilled at the sight, for I believed it meant she lived, that someone still lived inside her house.
The bear bellowed, shoved past me as I stepped farther out onto the dirt, her movements hurried with anger. I let her pass, and with the foundling left behind me in the passageway my hands were freed to drag back my torn and filthy sleeve to reveal my long-stalled watch, that round face, that hovered hand no longer walking its circles. With my other sleeve I scrubbed at its clouded surface, then abandoned my cleaning to wind its stem, and as I did when I tested our family with the fish and the rabbits, I invented my own rules to cause what would happen next—and my new rule said it did not matter what time it was, only that there was again time—and so I wound and I wound, and then I held that mechanism until the bear was halfway between the door and the house, and then with a flinch I let its wheel unwind.