Page 55

Jump-cut, moment to moment; lost time, skittering sidelong between action and re-. And suddenly, it’s later—maybe very late—with the oil-lamp’s shine joining a shifty play of firelight across the dusty floor . . . a huge, blood-warm, spark-leaking blaze I must have worked at least a whole half-hour to build, being the woodcraft-unfriendly little city mouse that I am.

(Late.)

The fire, the lamp. And me, looking down at something laid out across my lap, all big and stiff and . . . furry.

Something with a hood-like, floppy, shaggy head.

Something that smells, worse than the cabin around it. Worse even than my own stink of cold-sweat incredulity.

Something with empty eyes, and sleeves—their seams sutured fast with dried gut—that end in claws.

Something I know—must be—

(Oh, go on ahead and say it, Lee, baby. You know you want to.)

The bear-shirt, itself.

(Karl’s . . . bear)

—or what little’s left of it, at least. After he finally got through with it.

(Ah, shit.)

I feel my eyes sting, my head buzz; feel my inner arm hum with sympathetic pain, my Berkana tattoo puff rug-burn raw, just like it did the day Karl let them draw it on me. Make it to my feet, swaying slightly, and watch this terrible artifact I hold unfurl to brush the floor beneath me; Jesus Christ Almighty, but the fucking thing’s fucking huge. Big enough—

(—for two.)

Questions reeling through my head, answered practically in their moment of asking: So where’d I find this particular haphazard masterpiece of outsider art, anyway? Must’ve been in that closet gaping open by the bed—the one that looks so very familiar, ‘specially when I squint. And why am I having so much trouble forming these questions, in the first place? Well, the empty bottle by my boot might hold a key, rolling to clack against a few of its similarly empty buddies as I stagger back towards said closet, trailing Karl’s precious shirt in the dust—but barely make it to the bed before this subtle numbness in my face and hands spreads southward, felling me onto its rumpled sheets.

And yes, that is me crying openly now, all salt and snot. Me knotting tight into a wet-faced human ball, kicking off my offending Docs, shucking the rest of my trendy clothes to crawl inside this dead animal husk; me, slicking this unsanitary parody of a fur coat over my own naked skin and hugging it to me, sobbing.

I think about Karl, and wonder: Was it just too much for him, in the end? My desertion? This latest—last—failure? Or a self-image-destroying combination of the two, that awful morning after . . . cold light of day, the hard death of a lifetime’s dreaming, cut with blood-stink and mead-hangover?

Bear-grease on my cheeks, mixing with my tears. Bear-head pulled down over my nose like a mask, toothy jaw flapping to knock against my chin. And Karl’s spoor shedding everywhere it touches, marking me with his scent—its sheer bulk so like his, warm and heavy on all my most intimate parts. As I think, hysterically:

Got me under your skin, Karl, baby—down deep in the heart of you. So deep, I’m really . . .

. . . a part of you.

Just like you always said I was.

I still don’t know where he went, and maybe I never will. But—wherever he is, this isn’t with him. Which means it sure as hell can’t be where—

(or what)

—he wanted so desperately to be.

And the sad fact is, I think I know Karl well enough to know that if he couldn’t be what he wanted, then—in the end—he’d probably rather be . . .

. . . nothing at all.

* * *

So I cry myself to sleep, and dream my own dead dream—face-down, tapped out, crushed flat under ten years’ worth of retroactive anger and bitter regret. I dream of one more reading, the final one available: Berkana in fire, hot and close as this cabin, sliding swift towards incineration like one of those volcanic islands off Iceland’s coast, the kind that rise and fall in a flood of lava and a matter of days. Danger, Will Robinson; you don’t know as much as you think you do, not by fuckin’ half. So pay attention to detail, or pay—

—the price.

Rune-knowledge, hard-learned, flickering in and out like light through the Yggdrasil’s narrow leaves. But paying attention’s not exactly top of my list, right at this very moment. Instead, I find myself slipping down fast into a morass of memory crossed with fantasy—”feel” the bear-shirt part beneath Karl’s phantom hands as his stubbly profile glides quick across the sweaty small of my back, leaving a trail like the scratch of an open matchbook-cover all the way up my spine. Submerged, swamped, moaning and drooling in my drunken daze, I “hear” him snort and snuffle between my shoulder blades as he pulls me up by the tail, rooting and spreading and puppeting me around in that way he’s always liked best. “Feel” my mouth come open as he thrusts inside, coring me, and think: