The Third Bear (30 page)

Ed pulled up in a battered pickup truck that needed a coat of paint and new shocks. The back was filled with fishing tackle, old tires, and wooden boxes that appeared to be stuffed with hay.

He got out, said hello in decent English, and shook my hand. He didn't look like a shaman, even allowing for the fact that I'd only ever seen them in photos in books and read about one in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus.

"You're the shaman?" I asked.

"Yes - I'm Ed. James wrote to me a while back, so I was expecting your call."

"Ed" wore a baseball cap of indefinite origin, a denim jacket over a worn T-shirt, and a pair of faded blue jeans. He had a gold earring shaped like an otter in his left ear and a silver earring shaped like a seal in his right ear. His broad, wrinkled face had the half-Caucasian, half-Asian look shared by many in the area. He had eyes so blue and piercing it was hard to hold his gaze.

I felt like asking, "Is this your traditional dress? Because it's not very convincing." But I resisted. Instead, I asked, "Where are we going?"

Ed smiled. "We're going to consult the Book. It's near Shaman Rock."

I had heard of Shaman Rock from the travel guide. It was the holiest of holy sites in the old religions. Even going near it was hazardous according to some. But what the hell - this was what I was here to do. So I hopped into the passenger seat, held the door shut with a piece of electrical cord, and off we went, Ed using a series of dirt roads to get to our destination. (There wasn't anything paved within twenty miles of the condominiums. Not anymore. No need for it.)

"You know you need to pay me to see the Book?" Ed asked along the way.

I didn't, but luckily James had provided enough money.

Warning: Here comes another correction.

Erratum #4: "The Dragons of Manhattan, "John Grant, issue three

Any internally coherent set of explanations of the phenomena we observe around us starts off as the cutting-edge science of its day. Assuming it is widely accepted, it becomes a fixed dogma: To disagree with it is a stupid and indeed evil revolt against supposedly absolute knowledge. Even though humanity's retaliations against the rebels can be vicious in the extreme, eventually there are enough revolutionaries, and they are persistent enough, that the existing Grand Universal Theory is forced to adapt or give way to a new, improved version.

should be:

Any internally coherent set of explanations of the phenomena we observe around us becomes the cutting-edge science of its day. Assuming it is widely accepted, it devolves into dogma: To disagree with it is a stupid, evil revolt against supposedly absolute knowledge. But even though humanity's retaliations against the rebels can be vicious, eventually the revolutionaries are persistent enough that the existing Grand Universal Theory is forced to adapt or give way to a new, improved version.

I can't tell you where the Book is housed in relation to Shaman Rock. I can't tell you much of anything about it, because I promised Ed I wouldn't. And, besides, it's irrelevant to this story. What is relevant to this story is the Book itself.

It lay in its hiding place like something made from the earth - more than a thousand years old, according to Ed, and containing all the wisdom of his shaman forebears. It was fashioned from broad leaves and red bark. Dead beetles and the pelts of animals had been woven into its spine. Large and bulky, it smelled light, of mint and sea salt. The languages in which it had been set down were various and incomprehensible to me. Its cover, wood shot through with silver and bronze, had a worn, smooth feel that was pleasant to the touch. But the cover is all I got to touch, and all I saw of the pages was a quick five-minute glimpse before Ed motioned for me to move back, away from the Book.

In short, Jeremy, it was the most extraordinary object I have ever seen, and it is mostly my glimpse of the Book that allows me to maintain faith in this whole mad project. Certainly it wasn't James' reassurances or the all-tooordinary appearance of Ed himself.

That first day, all I did was read the erratum excerpt to Ed, who then consulted the Book, burned some incense, and told me after about an hour, "You've got the right manuscript. But that's the wrong part. And the change is small in this one. A slight change is all you need. Bring another part tomorrow and we'll start over."

Then he took me fishing in his cockleshell of a boat. We caught some white graylings, which we cooked over an open fire in the lobby back at the condo. It drove the seals away temporarily, but fascinated Juliette, who even seemed to like the taste of cooked fish. That's the kind of barbarism a circus will drive you to.

I repeated this process for weeks as I strove to find the right parts for the Errata. James called every once in a while to check up on me. For the most part, I didn't appreciate these calls.

Once he said, apropos of nothing, "I am a direct descendent of Cotton Mather and Increase Mather. Make of that what you will."

I haven't made much of it, let me tell you.

"Dave Eggers might read this issue," he said during his next-to-last call.

Of all the things he said, this made me angriest. "So the fuck what? After everything else you've told me, who gives a flying fuck about that? Fuck Dave Eggers. I'm freezing my ass off here, trying to believe in some shamanism thing that's probably bullshit, and you're thinking about Eggers?"

"Well," James said, "by my calculations, he's one of those who has to read it for us to be successful."

During another call, I was telling him about an unstable artist friend of mine, and he said, "At the age of eleven, I was a long-term patient in a hospital in Phoenix. On a single day, I was visited by the Pope, with whom I discussed superhero comics, and Mickey Mouse, with whom I discussed being visited by the Pope. An hour later, President Reagan was shot. These events helped to cement my thoughts about synchronicity."

"What the hell was that?" I said. I'd been telling him about the seals when he went off into his soliloquy. "Did you read that off a note card or something?"

"I did," he said.

"Why?"

"Fuel for your story. It needs to be in there. As does a mention of farm equipment."

Most of the time, we both tried to avoid the subject of Gradus, even though I would go to sleep thinking of him and wake up in the morning with a start, certain he was standing over me, and reach like a drowning man for my pearl-handled revolvers.

James' reasons for putting me in this position still remained cloudy, but I had decided not to open the second letter until after I finished the mind-numbing task of perfecting the Errata. And, after a while, I stopped asking James, because he refused to tell me over the phone. Which meant that only the letter could answer my remaining questions. Still, I resisted its pull.

Juliette helped me. I kept asking her if I should open the letter, and she refused to answer - for which silent advice I would reward her with some grayling.

Correction!

Erratum #5: My General," Carol Emshwiller, issue two

They'd given up on getting any information out of him. They said he was mine to do with as I wished. We always take them along with us and get them back in shape for our farms. "Don't be treating him too nice," they said. "He's dangerous." They say that every time. Nothing has happened so far and it's unlikely considering the shape they're always in.

should read:

They'd given up on getting any information out of him. They said he was mine to do with as I wished. We always take them along with us and get them back in shape for our farms. "He's dangerous," they said. "He killed a man. He'll kill you if you give him half a chance." They say that every time. Nothing has happened so far and it's unlikely considering the shape they're always in. Most of them are so shocked that their vision of the world has proven false that they fall into a stupor, as if their minds cannot adjust to their new situation. Their new world.

By now, I've grown used to the seals, and grown fond of Juliette. (In a reversal of our established roles, I've taken to buying fish for Juliette from Ed.) I've grown used to the rhythms of the lake and the sounds that begin at dusk - the sounds of owls, of bats, of the occasional night fisherman working without lights: rasping pieces of words in a foreign tongue, distorted by the water. I don't even mind bathing in the lake anymore. I jog and I do push-ups and have forgotten weight machines even exist. Even better, my readers can't get to me here, and neither can my editors. Really, all things considered, it should be peaceful. Except for the man in the freezer.

That happened the day before yesterday. Yesterday, I had visitors, strangely enough. The author and explorer Liz Williams had heard a rumor that I was in the area and stopped by with a couple of her friends on their way south, into China. You don't think of there being "explorers" today, but there are in this part of the world, and Liz is one of them.

They didn't stay as long as I might have liked, although I still was glad of the company. Juliette is not what one might call a sparkling conversationalist. And Ed either talks in riddles or asks for money.

While Liz's companions explored my surreal abode and were in turn investigated by the local seal community, Liz and I sat and talked, reliving Blackpool and various other adventures. After all that had happened in the twenty-four hours before that, I was relieved to experience a veneer of normalcy. Even if I was babbling. Even if my heart was pounding in my chest.