Terry Bisson - Bears Discover Fire

I could feel my blood pool, grow thick, grow cool. My body seemed to elongate—then suddenly I was gone; peeling away, up from the car, away from my body, into the light.

I was rising as if being pulled. There was no time to look back at my own body, or the mountains. Faster and faster, we were ascending into the realm of the dead: LAD space. I say we , for I was a shadow pursuing a shadow, yet together we were a circle of light, spinning in a dance harmonious. I ached for Sorel as a planet aches for its sun. The light loved us—and we spun basking in its sweet climactic endless glow, luxuriating in a nakedness so total that the body itself has been stripped off and set aside. I felt like the gods must feel, knowing that the world we lurch through in life is only their cast-off clothes. We rose into the lattice of light and it opened before us…

And I felt a sudden fear. It was slight, like the chill on the back of your neck when a door opens that shouldn’t be opened. The light was darkening around me and the presence at the end of my fingertips was suddenly gone. I was alone. I thought (yes, dead, but I “thought”!) something had gone wrong in the lab.

All was still. I was in a new darkness. Only this was a darkness unlike the darkness of blindness: here somehow I could see. I was alone on a gray plain that stretched forever in every direction, but instead of space I felt claustrophobia, for every horizon was close enough to touch. The chill had become a deep, cruel, vicious, bone cold. I tried to move and the darkness itself moved with me…

“Retrocution at three oh seven,” DeCandyle was saying; Sorel was slapping my cheeks. “We lost contact,” I heard her say.

I wasn’t in the car; I was lying down on the wheeled gurney. I was freezing. “Duration one hundred thirty-seven minutes,” DeCandyle said. Click .

I sat up and held my face in my hands. Both cheeks were cold. Both hands were shaking.

“I’ll drive him home,” Sorel said.

“Where were we?” I asked, but she wouldn’t answer me. Instead she drove faster and faster.

My studio was cold and I knelt to light the space heater. I fumbled with the damp matches, afraid she would leave, until I felt her hand on the back of my neck. She was undressed already, pulling me toward the bed, toward her plump, taut, cool breasts; her opening thighs. I forgot the chill I had felt in her womb, as cold and sweet as her mouth.

How backward romance’s metaphors are! For it is the flesh, scorned in song for so many centuries, that leads the spirit toward the light. Underneath our nakedness we discovered more nakedness still, entering and opening one another, until together we soared like creatures that cannot fly alone, but only joined; the naked flesh going where our naked spirits had been only hours before. What we made was more than love.

“Does he know?” I asked, afterward, when we were lying in the dark. I like the darkness; it equalizes things.

“Know? Who?”

“DeCandyle. Who do you think?”

“What I do is none of his business,” she said. “And what he knows, is none of yours.” It was the end of our first and longest conversation. I slept for six hours and when I woke up she was gone.

“Turns out I have a friend at Berkeley too,” my ex said when she came by on Thursday to drop off some microwavables. Cops have friends everywhere; at least they think of them as friends.

“DeCandyle was in the medical school until he was kicked out for selling drugs. The other one was in comparative lit until she was kicked out in her junior year. All very hush-hush but it seems she was using drugs to recruit students for experiments. I think there was even a death involved. I have another friend who’s checking the PD files.”

“Dum de-dum dum,” I said.

“I’m just giving you the facts, Ray. What you do with them, if anything, is up to you.” She was shuffling through my stacked canvases again. “I’m glad to see you’re doing mountains again. They were always your best sellers. And what have we here? Pornography?”

“Eye of the beholder,” I said.

“Bullshit. Don’t you think this is a little—gynecological—for Natural Geographic ? I know they show tits and all, but—”

“It’s National ,” I said. “And do me a favor—” I nodded toward her partner, who was standing just inside the door, foolishly thinking that if he stood perfectly still I wouldn’t know he was there. “As long as you and your boyfriend are playing Sergeant Friday, check out one more name for me.”

On Monday I was supposed to deliver the first batch of paintings in the series. DeCandyle sent a hired van to pick me up. I knew the driver. He was a local part-time preacher and abortion-clinic bomber. I was careful to keep the paintings covered as we loaded them in.

“I hear you’re working with the Hell Docs,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about; I’m just going in for a treatment,” I lied. “I am blind, you know.”

“Whatever you say,” he said. “I hear they’re sending a man and a woman to Hell. Sort of a new Adam and Eve.”

He laughed. I didn’t.

“Magnificent,” said DeCandyle, when he unwrapped the paintings in his office. “How can you do it? I could understand touch, sculpture; but painting? Colors?”

“I know what it looks like while I’m working on it,” I said. “After it’s dry, no. If you need a theory, my theory is that colors have smells; smells that are pitched too high for most people. So I’m like a dog that can hear a high-pitched whistle. That’s why I paint in oil and not acrylic.”

“So you don’t agree with the article in the Sun that it’s a psychic ability?”

“As a scientist, surely you don’t believe that crap.”

“ As a scientist,” DeCandyle said, “I don’t know what I believe anymore. But let’s go to work.”

There was something different about the echoes in the launch lab. I was led directly to the gurney, and helped onto it. “Where’s the car?” I protested.

“We are dispensing with the car for the rest of this series,” DeCandyle said. I knew he was only partly talking to me when I heard the click of his recorder. “With this insertion we will begin using the C-T or Cold Tissue chamber developed while I was in Europe. It will allow us to penetrate deeper into LAD space.” Click .

“Deeper?” I was alarmed; I didn’t like lying down. “By staying dead longer?”

“Not necessarily longer,” DeCandyle said. “The C-T chamber will cool the home tissue more rapidly, allowing faster LAD penetration. We hope on this insertion to actually penetrate the threshold barrier.” Click .

By home tissue he meant the corpse. “I don’t like this,” I said. I sat up on the gurney. “It’s not in my contract.”

“Your contract calls for five LAD insertions,” DeCandyle said. “However, if you don’t want to go—”

Just then Sorel came into the room in her jumpsuit. I could hear the swishing of the nylon between her legs.

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to go,” I said. “I just want—” But I didn’t know what I wanted. I lay back down and she lay down beside me. I heard the snap of tubes being attached; guided by hers, my hand slid into the smelly, cold mash of the glove. Our fingers met and entertwined. They were like teenagers, getting together in secret, each with its own little libido.

“Series forty-one, insertion three,” DeCandyle said. Click .

The gurney was rolling and we were pushed into a small chamber. I felt rather than heard a door close just behind my head: a softer click . I panicked but Sorel clutched my hand and the smell of atropine and formaldehyde filled the air. I felt myself falling—no, rising, with Sorel, linked, hand in hand, toward the light. This time we went more slowly and I saw our bodies laid out, spinning, naked as the day we were born. We rose into the lattice of light and it parted around us like a song.