The Third Bear (17 page)

Slumber frowned. "You're not being ignored. Nothing of importance is being discussed. You still go to the status meetings, and we discuss everything there."

Yes, the status meetings. During these meetings I now learned what Leer and Scarskirt and the others had decided during the prior week. I learned what lack of role I was to have during the next week. I would stare at Leer, willing her to return my gaze, to understand from the pained look on my face just how much this was hurting me. But she never did. Scarskirt would stare, though. A kind of measuring look. An appraisal. I did not like the hardness of that glance, given while she told a joke. A stolen glimpse to test my resolve.

I tried to argue with Slumber, but he cut me off. "We can always give you another leech if you like, to cure your discomfort," he said. "But don't worry, we all value you."

He left, and five minutes later was laughing and joking with Leer and Scarskirt.

Now I had to send out my beetles as spies, just so I would know the basics of what was happening, just so I could do my job. But beetles are not meant as spies; they are made to disseminate information, not capture it. Despite all my efforts to change them, most did a poor job. Several never came back and I had to destroy others that had been tampered with by Scarskirt so they would not infect the rest.

I could not complain to the Mord by then. I had discovered he was not my friend. While seeking solace in isolation, I came upon the Mord and Scarskirt in a forgotten part of the third floor, among the musty ruins of some sort of outdated cathedral. They stood upon a crumbling platform decorated with gold leaf, leaning toward each other, connected at the forehead by the disembodied siphon of a long-necked clam. I watched them for half an hour, noting the bliss on their faces. I could see that they were far, far away. The Mord was now much more animal than flesh-and-blood. I could smell his musk even from my hiding place.

I had begun to call him "the Mord," as had many others.

Unacceptable Disregard for Good Practice

One day, a design was presented at a status meeting and it had the face of my remote friends, "Winterlong," looking slack and haggard. The cat-thing with pigeon legs meowed and Winterlong's face contorted into a meow.

I was shocked. I had just talked to him that morning.

After the meeting, I took Leer aside. Leer was wearing a ridiculous pink jacket made of living shark scales that Scarskirt had given her. She had been parading around in it all week, delighted with her office mate's castoffs.

"That was Winterlong," I said. "Butchered."

Scarskirt came up behind us without warning. She spoke before Leer could reply.

"Don't be ridiculous or paranoid," Scarskirt said. She laughed, but it was not her pretty laugh. It was more like a horsehead laugh. Her eyes were wide and bright and the blade of her smile cut me.

"You're imagining things," Leer said, staring at Scarskirt. "That wasn't Win- terlong. Not really." But her eyes were moist and her voice was thin and sad.

Winterlong's personal effects showed up on Scarskirt's desk soon after.

"He had no relatives," Scarskirt explained at the next status meeting, batting her eyes at Slumber, who made a sound like the world's laziest orgasm.

The First of My Proactive Efforts

Once, when things were still good, Leer and I had shared beetles. We had even created a few just for fun. At lunch, we would sneak out behind the company building with a blanket and sit on the little hill there, looking out onto a ravaged landfill heavy with the skeletons of vultures and then, beyond that, the city in all its strange mix of menace and vulnerability. The grass was yellowing rather than dead. A wiry tree stood on the hill at that time. We would eat crackers and old cans of shredded meat, the smell in that context almost unbearably tantalizing.

After lunch, we would unlock the cases containing our beetles. The shining green-and-crimson carapaces would open like the lids of eccentric jewelry boxes to reveal their golden wings, and we would release them into the world.

Those beetles contained every joyous thing we had ever known, and we loved to watch them fly out into the distance.

"My father's dry laugh!" I would shout.

"My mother's mock frown!" Leer would reply.

"The color of the faded cover of my nursery rhyme book!"

"The taste of real potato soup!"

"The feel of thousand-thread-count clean sheets!"

"The ache of muscles after playing stick ball!"

Our voices would get softer and softer until I was whispering things like "The smell of my father's aftershave when he reached down to hug me."

Then we would stand there, trailing off into silence, and get so much satisfaction out of wondering who would find them and what impact they would have on their discoverers. Sometimes we would even have tears in our eyes.

I can remember Leer saying once, "This hill makes me happy."

So it was that when I decided to become proactive in the midst of my worsening situation, I persuaded Leer to join me on the hill, "for old time's sake."

The grass was mostly gone by then and the tree, too. Earthworms writhed and died in the naked dirt. The day was cold and gray, and the city did not bear looking at. The muffled sound of explosions, the smells of smoke and intense rot, told the story well enough. We stood there and turned our backs on the city, looking up at the company building and searching for glimpses of the behemoth grub, lost in the low-lying clouds.

"What has happened, Leer?" I asked her. "I haven't changed. I'm still the same as I ever was."

Leer refused to look at me. She stood with arms folded and stared into the blank windows in front of her. On this day, she had revisited her true form. There was no artifice to her.

"You're imagining things," Leer said.

"Like I imagined Winterlong's face," I said.

"Yes," she said, but so quietly I almost couldn't hear her.

"Leer, I know things have changed. It's not my imagination. We all used to be so close."

"Do you know," Leer said, "how much I hate this place? I hate my job. I hate being here. And I hate the world out there."

I shuddered at that. To think of the past, the distant past, before all of this - she was right. Who could bear it? Sometimes I wondered if we had been sending out those beetles not to help others but to help get rid of the horrible weight of happy memories.

"I know you hate it," I said. "I've known that for a while. I'm not stupid. But what does that have to do with me?"

Leer said, "Why do you fight it? Why do you care about any of it?"

"In the old days, we were all friends," I said.

"It can't be that way anymore. It's just work."

"But why?"

Leer just shrugged.

I think I started to cry then.

Leer took pity on me and said, "It'll be better. It'll be better, I'm sure of it. When we're under Slumber. Then it will all be fine."

By then, we had both noticed the Mord coming up the hill. He was larger than I remembered and his thick fur had a golden brown luster to it. His eyes and fangs stood out more.

The Mord wasn't walking up the hill. The Mord was levitating up the hill, effortless.

I expelled my breath all in a rush.

Leer blanched and a look of terror came over her face.

"I couldn't bear to be disconnected from the worms," she whispered to me. "And Mord can read lips."

The Mord settled down in front of us. Even sitting on the incline, he was taller than us, and his shadow unfurled itself across us and across the entire top of the hill. I had the curious sensation of seeing his human face superimposed over his animal features, for just a second.

Then I caught a hint of movement behind him, at the bottom of the hill. Scarskirt stood there, her arms folded, her legs apart, sentinel-silent.

Leer looked me in the eyes and said, "We don't want you here. We aren't the same. You've changed. You don't do good work anymore."

The Mord let out a roar that pushed its blood-shot, crazed eyes half out of their sockets and pressed my hair flat against the sides of my head. In the Mord's breath I could smell a thousand different kinds of rot. I could smell the stench of the entire company.

Ad Hoc Meetings, Further Abnegating Process

Soon after the encounter with the Mord, my Manager began to visit me for reasons other than to ask her perpetual question. She would burst in near the end of the day and begin to rant, spittle flying from her mouth. Sometimes the language would be foreign to me. Sometimes I could understand the words but the context was incomprehensible. Other times, there would be no words, just shouts and shrieks and grunts.

My Manager's body would contort during these meetings, like a wet rag being wrung dry. She had become impossibly thin so that her eyes were cavernous in her face. The smell of wet burning plastic clung to her. Her hair had fallen out and she always wore a different wig, some of them living and some of them dead.

"I don't know how to help you," I would tell her, genuinely concerned about her. In the context of my current situation, I thought she was, if not a friend, then at least not an enemy.

Those of my spy beetles that had survived the change of purpose had recorded a variety of images in the myriad halls and passageways of the third floor. One of the most arresting involved my Manager. I had seen her, pensive and quietly weeping, walking across a cracked marble floor, only to stop and give out a cry of surprise. For hunching toward her with wet abandon was the fish with her face, and in that moment as the beast drew near, I saw an image that haunted me: of my Manager's shock registering simultaneously on two identical faces. I am sure this is the first time she knew of the discontinuation of the fish project.