Matt Bell - In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

It was there in the black that I changed for the first time, that I became some other shape than grieving woman, than widow bereft.

She said, I was not always a bear, but I was not before that just one other thing.

Neither was he, she said. He was both whale and squid, and once a man, once many men, perhaps.

He was so old when I met him, she said, but even in his old awfulness he could still be gentle, and in the lake-black our shapes did not matter, and so we were as one for a time, and the next time we separated I was two, one floating inside the other, and he was still his same multitude, his legion of possibility, a thousand shapes all wanting only to be made more, to be taken out of the lake and onto the dirt, then back into the other world, the country where what he was might spread.

All I wanted was one child, one boy to love, to take the place of the man I had lost, and when I saw I could not have just that then I hid his child inside me and refused all others, and with what strength he had taught me I kept him away until I could escape the black, the water above. Against his anger, I left the lake and went back to the woods, where I was sure he could not follow, and in my cave, among the dark shadows gathered between the world’s broad bones, there I saw that it was our children who gave us shape, as much as we shaped them, and for my coming child I became a bear, meant us both be bears forever, so that what human miseries I had known might never know him.

The light from the fires above had long faded, and the broken shafts of light falling from the surface could not reach this deep either, and now there was only darkness. Or rather, not darkness but the whole of that element that I had never experienced upon the dirt, with its moon and its moons, and only partially under the lake. Now here was the fullness of the black , the truth of that element undiluted and worse than I’d imagined. The black was thick in places and hot too, and also it was cold and thin at other depths, and whatever it was it was always there. Other senses failed too, so that sometimes I could not feel my skin, goosefleshed with chill or else sweating and bloody, nor could I any longer hear through the weight of the black’s silence. My tongue went numb, and the inside of my nose felt so full of silt that I could not clear it, and still the bear moved downward, still she bellowed soundlessly, as I felt her lungs fill and empty below my legs, when I felt anything at all.

Downward and downward she took us, navigating by something I could not sense, perhaps the smell of her cub’s last disguised passing, perhaps the scent of the woman who stole him away. I could not even see my fingers in front of my face, but I felt or else imagined that the way occasionally flattened, straightened, that we arrived at wide landings, at whole floors riddled with black passageways leading away from the stairs toward other black chambers. It was only there among those widest floors that the bear became confused, almost lost. There she had to put her bloody nose to the ground and sniff for her trail, and I wondered how much better even her weakened senses were that she could smell so much through the black when I could not, and if what confused her was not losing the trail but rather having it fracture, spreading in too many directions, for even though those passageways were as yet unlit they were not empty, and if they were like those above, then they might have held me, might have held my wife, and also the bear and the squid and the fingerling and the foundling, and I saw in the bear’s nosing of the stone floors that whereas the deep house had been mostly our past this deeper house could have been our future—but then that future was dark and cold, an emptied gulf where there was nothing to hear but silence, nothing to see but absence, nothing to own but our lack.

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 Agraying 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.