The Third Bear (43 page)

One night, Lucius and I so very very drunk, trying too hard to impress, I boasted that with my secret knowledge of reanimation, my Preservationist background, and my two years of medical school, I could resurrect the dead, create a golem from flesh and blood. Human, with a human being's natural life span.

"And I will assist him," Lucius announced, finger pointed at the ceiling. "Onward!"

We stumbled out of the tavern's soft light, accompanied by the applause of friends who no doubt thought I was taking a piss - into the darkness of the street, and carried by drunkenness and the animating spirit of our youth, stopping only to vomit into the gutter once or maybe twice, we lurched our debauched way up the hill to the medical school, and in the shadows stole past the snoring old guard, into the cadaver room.

I remember the spark to the night, cold as it was. I remember the extravagant stars strewn across the sky. I remember the euphoria, being not just on a quest, but on a drunken quest, and together, best of friends in that moment.

If only we had stayed in that moment.

"Preservation is a neutral thing," my mother told me once. "It prolongs a state that already exists. It honors the essence of something."

She stood in the back room surrounded by buckets of pungent water when she said this to me. I think I was twelve or thirteen. She had a ladle and was stirring some buckets, sipping from others. Glints and sparkles came from one. Others were dark and heavy and dull. The floor, once white tile, had become discolored from decades of water storage. The bloody rust circles of the buckets. The hemorrhaging green-blue stains.

"But the essence of preservation," my mother said, "is that it doesn't last. You can only preserve something for so long, and then it is gone. And that's all right."

My father had entered the room just before she said this. The look of love and sadness she gave the two of us, me sitting, my father standing behind me, was so stark, so revelatory, that I could not meet her gaze.

Looking back at that moment, I've often wondered if she already knew our futures.

In the cadaver room, we picked a newly dead woman who had drowned in the sea. Probably the daughter of a fisherman. She lay exposed on the slab, all strong shoulders and solid breasts and sturdy thighs. Her ankles were delicate, though, as were the features of her face. She had frozen blue eyes and pale skin and an odd smile that made me frown and hesitate for a moment.

It will come as no surprise we chose her in part because her body excited me. Although Lucius' presence had helped me in this regard, women, for all our boasting, are not drawn to impoverished medical students. Even on those rare occasions, it had been in the dark and I had only had glimpses of a woman's naked form. The dissections of the classroom did not count; they would drive most men to celibacy if not for the resilience of the human mind.

"This one?" Lucius asked.

I don't know if he still thought this was a lark, or if he knew how serious I was.

"I think so," I said. "I think this is the one."

And, although I didn't know it, I did mean the words.

We stood there and stared at her. The woman reminded me of someone the more I stared. It was uncanny, and yet I could not think of who she looked like. So taken was I by her that I pushed her hair from her face.

Lucius nudged my shoulder, whispered, "Stop gawking. That guard might wake up or his replacement come by at any minute."

Together, we bundled her in canvas like a rug, stole past the guard, and, by means of a wagon Lucius had arranged - from a friend used to Lucius' pranks - we took her, after a brief stop at my apartment to pick up some supplies, to a secluded cove well away from the city. I meant to preserve her tethered in the water, in the sargassum near the rockline. It was a variation on an old preservation trick my mother had once shown a client.

The physical exertion was intense. I remember being exhausted by the time we hauled her out of the cart. Her body would not cooperate; there was no way for her not to flop and become unwound from the canvas at times. It added to the unreality of it all, and several times we collapsed into giggles. Perhaps we would have sobered up sooner if not for that.

Luckily the moon was out and Lucius had brought a lantern. By then, my disorganized thoughts had settled, and although I was still drunk I had begun to have doubts. But this is the problem with having an accomplice. If Lucius hadn't been there, I would like to think I'd have put a stop to it all. But I couldn't, not with Lucius there, not with the bond between us now. As for what kept Lucius beside me, I believe he would have abandoned me long before if not for a kind of jaded hedonism - the curiosity of the perpetually bored.

It was hard. I had to think of the woman as a receptacle, a vehicle, for resurrection, not the end result. We laid her out atop the canvas and I drew symbols on her skin with ink I'd daubed onto my fingers. Holding her right hand, I said the words I had found in the books, knowing neither their meaning nor their correct pronunciation. I rubbed preservatives into her skin that would not just protect her flesh while she lay amongst the sargassum but actually bring it back to health. I had to do some cutting, some surgery, near the end. An odd autopsy, looking for signs of the "mechanical defect" as one of my instructors used to say, that would preclude her reanimation. I cleared the last fluid from her lungs with a syringe.

By this time I could not tell you exactly what I was doing. I felt imbued with preternatural, instinctual knowledge and power, although I had neither. What I had were delusions of grandeur spurred on by alcohol and the words of my friends, tempered perhaps by memories of my parents' art.

Lucius held the lantern and kept muttering, "Oh my God" under his breath. But his tone was not so much one of horror as, again, morbid fascination. I have seen the phenomenon since. It is as if a mental list is being checked off on a list of unique experiences.

By the time I had finished, I knew the dead woman as intimately as any lover. We took her down to the sargassum bed and we laid her there, floating, tethered by one foot using some rope. I knew that cove. I'd swum in it since I was a child. People hardly ever came there. The sargassum was trapped; the tide only went out in the spring, when the path of the currents changed. The combination of the salt water, the preservatives I'd applied to her, and the natural properties of the sargassum would sustain her as she made her slow way back to life.

Except for the sutures, she looked as if she were asleep, still with that slight smile, floating on the thick sargassum, glowing from the emerald tincture that would keep the small crabs and other scavengers from her. She looked otherworldly and beautiful.

Lucius gave a nervous laugh. He had begun to sober up.

"Any suggestions on what we do next?" he said, disbelief in his voice.

"We wait."

"Wait? For how long? We've got classes in the morning. I mean, it's already morning."

"We wait for a day."

"Here? For a whole day?"

"We come back. At night. She'll still be here."

There's nothing in the nature of a confession that makes it any more or less believable. I know this, and my shadow on the beach knows it, or he would have talked to me by now. Or I would have talked to him, despite my misgivings.

I haven't seen Lucius in forty years. My shadow could be Lucius. It could be, but I doubt it.

ii.

In the morning, for a time, neither Lucius nor I knew whether the night's events had been real or a dream. But the cart outside of our rooms, the deep fatigue in our muscles, and the blood and skin under our fingernails - this evidence convinced us. We looked at each other as if engaged in some uneasy truce, unwilling to speak of it, still thinking, I believe, that it would turn out to have been a hallucination.

We went to classes like normal. Our friends teased us about the bet, and I shrugged, gave a sheepish grin while Lucius immediately talked about something else. The world seemed to have changed not at all because of our actions and yet I felt completely different. I kept seeing the woman's face. I kept thinking about her eyes

Did the medical school miss the corpse? If so, they ignored it for fear of scandal. How many times a year did it happen, I've always wondered, and for what variety of reasons?

That night we returned to the cove, and for three nights more. She remained preserved but she was still dead. Nothing had happened. It appeared I could not bring her back to life, not even for a moment. The softly hushing water that rocked her sargassum bed had more life to it than she. Each time I entered a more depressed and numbed state.

"What's her name, do you think?" Lucius asked me on the third night.

He was sitting on the rocks, staring at her. The moonlight made her pale skin luminous against the dark green.

"She's dead," I said. "She doesn't have a name."

"But she had a name. And parents. And maybe a husband. And now she's here. Floating."

He laughed. It was a raw laugh. I didn't like what it contained.

On the afternoon of the first day, Lucius had been good-natured and joking. By the second, he had become silent. Now he seemed to have lost something vital, some sense of perspective. He sat on the rocks drawn in on himself, huddled for warmth. I hated his questions. I hated his attitude.