The Third Bear (10 page)

I know I should think of Aunt Etta every day. I know I should be kinder to her memory. I know I should be sorrier about what happened. But even when I came across the photo again yesterday, while cleaning up the attic, all I could see was Sensio, and all I had inside of me was frustration, and a kind of anger that won't go away. That I didn't ask the questions before, or the right way, and that this would've made all the difference. Whenever I catch a glimpse of rabbits on TV, or at the mall pet shop, I hope to see one more time that great, that animating impulse in a large, almond-shaped eye, but I never do.

Although I had Sensio for another four years after I was sent back north, he never spoke to me again. Not a single word. Not even to tell me, one more time, that he was not a rabbit. I woke one morning and he was dead: just an old white rabbit with patchy fur, lying on his side, and looking out toward something I could not see.

FINDING SONORIA

John Crake and Jim Bolger sat in Crake's living room. A small blue-green postage stamp lay on the old, low coffee table in front of them.

Bolger was a private detective once known all over Minnesota for his skill at finding people. He had the face of a pug and the build of a construction worker, or a weightlifter gone to seed. The jacket he wore made him seem even bigger, almost rectangular.

Crake had retired as a surveyor for the county three years ago. He'd been used to getting up at dawn and walking and driving around for hours. He had gained a little weight since his retirement, but not much, and he still wore bright plaid shirts, the kind of clothing that might distinguish him from a deer.

To Crake, the slopped-on cologne smell rising from Bolger was a surprise. To Bolger, Crake looked too tall even sitting down, but also like easy money.

"You want me to find a fucking country?" Bolger said. He picked up the stamp. In his palm, it looked like a strange Band-Aid. "Ever heard of the Internet, or the library?"

Crake had to resist the urge to tell Bolger to put it down, and Bolger, noticing that hesitation, moved the stamp to his other hand, then back again.

"I've checked the Internet, but there's no `Sonoria,' just Sonora. Now I want you to try. Is that a problem?" Crake said. Ever since a throat cancer scare, Crake's voice had been low, and sometimes, whether he wanted it to or not, it sounded menacing. His wife Grace had loved the new voice, but she'd died of breast cancer the next year. He'd had no kids with Grace, had restarted his stamp collection after she was gone.

"If it's there, I want you to find it," Crake said. Crake's mind worked one way. He wanted a mind that worked another way.

Bolger just looked at him. But the fact was, Bolger's business had been in the crapper ever since he'd been hired by a state senator to spy on the man's wife. Bolger had entered into the case with gusto and delivered the news of the wife's multiple affairs with a cheerfulness that, looking back, Bolger figured he should have dialed down a bit. It wasn't so much "kill the messenger" as "kill the messenger's business."

In the old days, Bolger wouldn't have been in Crake's house, drinking tap water out of a dirty glass. In the old days, Crake would've come to the Imperial Hotel and paid for good whiskey and they would've sat in leather chairs, Bolger messing with his gold cufflinks or his expensive watch while Crake got smaller and smaller in Bolger's presence.

Crake had offered Bolger sardines, too, because Grace had liked them, so Crake still stocked up on them. Crake, staring across at Bolger, thought, This is the kind ofperson who would blast a warning shot ifI crossed his lawn.

"Look," Crake said, "it'll be worth your while. And if the place doesn't exist, that's not your fault."

Bolger snorted. "You got that right." It was the kind of snort Crake would've expected from a sausage, if a sausage could snort.

"So what do you say, Mr. Bolger?"

"Sonoria. A country not on the map. You want it found. Okay, I'll find it for you, Mr. Surveyor. Four hundred a day plus expenses - and that's cheap."

Even as he said it, Bolger knew he was willing to go as low as two hundred a day, but what kind of client had faith in someone who started out as a discount detective?

"I can't afford that," Crake said, lying. He had a good pension, and a couple hundred thousand he'd stolen from people while surveying, buried out in the yard.

"Well, fuck, Crake, why did I come all the way over here, then?"

"I can't afford it. I'm sorry." Crake wasn't stingy, but he didn't want to pay too much for something this risky.

"How about two hundred a day?" As soon as he said it, Bolger was cursing himself. Too large a drop; it looked bad.

"I can't afford that, either." Crake thought: I can't afford to spend that much just because I've been having dreams about the place.

Bolger looked down at the table, back up at Crake. "You're a cheap motherfucker."

"And your business is in the toilet."

There. Crake had said it, and now Bolger thought he knew why Crake had called him.

Bolger half-rose, sat back down, feeling awkwardly like some kind of caged animal.

"You bastard. Well, what the hell can you afford?" Bolger said.

"Fifty a day."

"Fifty? Fifty." Bolger felt for a second like his heart, which sometimes seemed lodged in his large gut, was going to stop beating.

"There shouldn't be much in the way of expenses."

"Fifty, huh."

That should cover his daily rent at least, a little gas. He still had some savings and a couple of residual clients.

Crake rose suddenly and put out his hand, forcing Bolger to rise awkwardly and do the same.

"I know you can do it," Crake said as they shook hands, as if Bolger'd already agreed.

Bolger sighed. "And I know it's fucking insane, Crake. But I guess that's your problem, right?"

Crake's grip was stronger than the man looked, and Bolger's hand ached as he walked through the snow back out to his car.

As a child, Crake had collected stamps for their exotic qualities, and the colors. His mother approved, but his father, a tough bastard who claimed he'd been a Golden Gloves champ and had once made his living selling women's deodorant door-to-door, thought it was a hobby for "sissies." By the time his father was prematurely forcing him to learn how to drive with a clutch and signing him up for baseball, Crake had put aside the stamps.

Once, though, before he gave it up, his mother had given him a dozen stamps from "Nippon." Delicate traceries of cherry blossoms and storks and other images had conveyed a kind of distant otherness that made him shiver. At the time, he hadn't realized "Nippon" meant "Japan," and so the country itself had been a mystery, a place not found on the globe, waiting to be discovered. Even as late as eighteen or nineteen he'd remember those stamps and think that someday he would have a job that allowed him to travel a lot. Instead, he'd fallen into the path of least resistance: easy surveying job, wife, and inheriting his parents' home when they died.

Now, though, Crake had found another undiscovered country: Sonoria. Only, he couldn't find it on the map. The stamp had come with a Lewis & Clark commemorative set: small, triangular, trapped in a corner, the illustrated side facing away. The back of the stamp had yellow discoloration, indicating some age, the glue having melted.

Memories of the Nippon stamps, long lost, came to him as he sat at the worn table in the dining room, under a single light bulb. The bass of someone's idling car outside throbbed on and on despite the late hour. The neighborhood had changed; now he knew only Mrs. Stevenson and her daughter Rachel, who lived on the corner.

When he had found it, Crake had taken a pair of tweezers and extracted the odd stamp from the envelope. He turned it over and set it down on the table, on top of the envelope. It was an etching, very carefully rendered, of a mountain range, with a river winding through the foreground. Whoever had created the stamp had managed to mix muted colors - greens, blues, purples, and browns - into a clever tapestry of texture. For a moment, the river seemed to move, and Crake drew in his breath, sat back, magnifying glass clutched tightly in his hand. Across the three corners of the stamp, he read the words "Republic of Sonoria."

Crake raised an eyebrow. Sonoria? He'd never heard of it. It sounded faintly Eastern European - Romania? - and it was true he still had trouble identifying the former Soviet republics, but it still sounded false to him. He stared at the picture on the stamp again, shivered a little as if a breeze blew across the grassy plains surrounding the river. Something about the image stirred some deeply buried recognition.

Carefully, as if the precision were important, he picked up the stamp using the tweezers and placed it back in the envelope, in the same position, with the front facing inward. Then he walked over to the map of the world framed in his bedroom, and he looked for Sonoria. First, he tried Eastern Europe, then Central Asia, then random places, then systematically from left to right. No Sonoria in Asia, Europe, South America. No island named Sonoria. No isthmus. No province. No state. No city. Nothing. Unless it was so small it wouldn't show up on a map? Or it was one of those countries that had disappeared into the maw of another country?

Then he stood back, gazing at the map. It was probably a fake stamp someone had stuck in there as a joke. That's what Grace would've said. Just a joke. Why should he waste his time with it?

But that night, as Crake tried to get to sleep, he recalled the weathered quality of the stamp, the yellowish stain on the back, the high quality of the image on the front, and something about it worried at him, made him restless. He felt hot and out of sorts. When he did finally get to sleep, he dreamed he stood in front of a huge rendering of the stamp that blotted out the sky. The image in the stamp was composed of huge dots, but the dots began to bleed together, and then swirled into a photograph that became a living, moving scene. On the plains, strange animals were moving. Over the wide and roiling river, kingfishers dove and reappeared, bills thick with fish. The mountains in the distance were wreathed with cloud. A smell came to him, of mint and chocolate and fresh air far from the exhaust and haze of cities. Then the stars came up in a sky of purest black and blotted it all out, and he woke gasping for breath, afraid, so afraid, that he might forget this glimpse, this door into the Republic of Sonoria.