The Third Bear (48 page)

Inside, beneath the dust and storm damage, I found the echoes of my parents' preservations - familiar fond splotches across the kitchen tiles - and read their recipes in the residue.

From these remnants, what they taught me of their craft, and the knowledge I brought back from my travels, I now make my modest living. These are not quite the preservations of my youth, for there is even less magic in the world now. No, I must use science and magic in equal quantities in my tinctures and potions, and each comes with a short tale or saying. I conjure these up from my own experience or things my parents told me. With them, I try to conjure up what is so easily lost: the innocence and passion of first love, the energy and optimism of the young, the strange sense of mystery that fills midnight walks along the beach. But I preserve more prosaic things as well - like the value of hard work done well, or the warmth of good friends. The memories that sustain these concoctions spring out of me and through my words and mixtures into my clients. I find this winnowing, this release, a curse at times, but mostly it takes away what I do not want or can no longer use.

Mine is a clandestine business, spread by word-of-mouth. It depends as much on my clients' belief in me as my craft. Bankers and politicians, merchants and landlords hear tales of this strange man living by himself in a preservationists' bungalow, and how he can bring them surcease from loneliness or despair or the injustice of the world.

Sometimes I wonder if one day Lucius will become one of my clients and we will talk about what happened. He still lives in this city, as a member of the city council, having dropped out of medical school, I'm told, not long after he performed the surgery on me. I've even seen him speak, although I could never bring myself to walk up to him. It would be too much like talking to a ghost.

Still, necessity might drive me to him as it did in the past. I have to fill in with other work to survive. I dispense medical advice to the fisherfolk, many driven out of work by the big ships, or to the ragged urchins begging by the dock. I do not charge, but sometimes they will leave a loaf of bread or fish or eggs on my doorstep, or just stop to talk.

Over time, I think I have forgiven myself. My thoughts just as often turn to the future as the past. I ask myself questions like When I die, what will she do? Will the arm detach itself, worrying at the scar line with sharpened fingernails, leaving only the memory of my flesh as the fingers pull it like an awkward crab away from my death bed? Is there an emerald core that will be revealed by that severance, a glow that leaves her in the world long after my passing? Will this be loss or completion?

For her arm has never aged. It is as perfect and smooth and strong as when it came to me. It could still perform surgery if the rest of me had not betrayed it and become so old and weak.

Sometimes I want to ask my mirror, the other old man, what lies beyond, and if it is so very bad to be dead. Would I finally know her then? Is it too much of a sentimental, half-senile fantasy, to think that I might see her, talk to her? And: have I done enough since that ecstatic, drunken night, running with my best friend up to the cadaver room, to have deserved that mercy?

One thing I have learned in my travels, one thing I know is true. The world is a mysterious place and no one knows the full truth of it even if they spend their whole life searching. For example, I am writing this account on the beach, each day's work washed away in time for the next, lost unless my counterpart has been reading it.

I am using my beloved's hand, her arm as attached to me as if we were one being. I know every freckle. I know how the bone aches in the cold and damp. I can feel the muscles tensing when I clench the purple stick and see the veins bunched at the wrist like a blue delta. A pale red birthmark on the heel of her palm looks like a snail crossing the tidal pool at my feet. We never really knew each other, not even each other's names, but sometimes that's not important.

APPOGGIATURA

(Fragments from the legendary city ofSmaragdines Green Tablet)

Autocthonous

At the university today, I cracked an egg yolk into my co-worker Farid's coffee while he was off photocopying something. The yolk looked like the sun disappearing into a deep well. The smell made me think of the chickens on my parents' farm and then it wasn't long before I was thinking about my father and his temper. It made me almost regret doing it. But when Farid came back he didn't even notice the taste. He was too busy researching the architecture of some American city for one of the professors. My yolk and his research were a good fit as far as I was concerned, especially since that was supposed to be my project. But he was always pushing and he was an artist, whereas I was just getting a history and religion degree. I wouldn't have anything to show for that until much later.

After he left and the building was empty, I set a fire in the wastebasket on the fourth floor, being careful to use a bit of string as a fuse so it wouldn't start to blaze until after I'd gotten on the bus down the street.

On the way home to my apartment, through the usual road blocks and searches, I embedded a personal command into the minds of the other people on the bus using the image of the saintly Hermes Trismegistus. He said to them, "Tomorrow, you will do something extraordinary for the Green of Smaragdine."

When I got to the complex, I stopped at each landing and used a piece of chalk to draw a random symbol. If there was a newspaper in front of someone's door, I would write on it or rip it or whatever came to mind.

I walked into my box of an apartment, gray walls, gray rooms, and took off my clothes. I painted myself green and leapt at the walls until the green mixed with the red of my blood and the gray was gone. Exhausted, I stopped, and pissed once again on my long-suffering copy of the blasphemous book Farid liked so much. Then I turned on the family TV that my mother had made me take when I came to the city and at the same moment I drove a paperweight through the screen. My fingers and arm vibrated from the shock.

But nothing else happened. There was no revelation. No sign.

I crumpled to the floor and began to cry.

When will the Green move through me? What will it take?

Cambist

At the Anadolubank in Istanbul, Hazine Tarosian has handled them all. Crinkled and smooth, crisp and softly old. To her, new bills smell like ink and presses moving at high speed. There's a hint of friction in the paper, of burning smoke, that gives motion to the images. A burst of sunflower, bee in orbit around pollen, for the Netherlands. Ireland's beefy headshot of James Joyce, with Ulysses on the other side. The sibilance of Egypt's Arabic letters against a backdrop of Caliph-era battlements, in the distance a verdigris dome, last link to fabled Smaragdine. The careful detail of Thai King Bhumibol calm upon his throne, sword across his lap, a flaming mandala at his back. Or even Portugal's massed galleons listing, sails taut against the whorled wind, sun a complex compass.

Hazine has begun to believe that the value of such wonders should be based on something more lasting than the rate of exchange. The verdigris dome in particular has so enthralled her that she even bought a book about Smaragdine called The Myths ofthe Green Tablet, and got her cousin to send her a few old coins she keeps in a display at her bank office.

For months now the image of the dome has come to her at night. She is floating over it and it is floating up toward her, until she's falling down through the dome and she can see, distant but ever closer: a green tablet, a ruined tower, an entire ancient city.

This dream is so vivid that Hazine always wakes gasping, the solution to some great mystery already receding into the darkness. Friends tell her the dream is about her job, and yet it informs her waking life in unexpected ways, imbues certain people and things with vibrant light and color. She keeps the Egyptian bill in her wallet. The suggestion, the hint, of Smaragdine, is so potent, as if a place must be hidden to become real.

Is this, then, the power of money? Hazine thinks, bringing tea and the newspaper back to bed with her in the mornings, her lover asleep and dreamless beside her.

Chiaroscuro

I was still searching for the missing daughter of a wealthy industrialist from Cyprus when the locals brought me in on another case. They'd heard I was staying at the Hilton - an American and a detective, in a city where neither passed through with any regularity. The police deputy, a weathered old man with a scar through his left eyesocket, made it clear that it would be best if I got into his beat-up Ford Fiesta with the lonely siren on top, and venture out into the sun-beaten city to help him.

It was a crap ride, through a welter of tan buildings with no hint anymore of the green that had made the place famous since antiquity. The river had become a stream. The lake that it fed into was entombed in salt. The cotton they turned to as a crop just made it all worse. They'd survived a dictator, too, who had starved and disappeared people while building a monstrous palace. Becoming modern is a bitch for some people.

The dead guy, a painter, the deputy told me, turned out to have lived on the seventh floor of what looked like a Soviet-era housing project made from those metal shelves you see at hardware stores. The smell of piss and smoke in the stairwell almost made me want to give up cigarettes again and find a bar. Most of the complex was deserted.

The painter's place had an unwashed, turpentine-and-glue smell. Several large canvases had been leaned against the wall, under cloth. Through a huge window the light entered with a ferocious velocity. Somewhere out in that glare lay the ruins of the old city center.

In the middle of the floor: a young man in the usual pool of blood. I could see a large, tissue-filled hole in his back. The piss smell had gotten worse. Behind him, one canvas remained uncovered on an easel.

Against a soft dark green background so intense it hit me like the taste of mouthwash, a girl sat on a stone bench in an explosion of light. A dark complexion or just a deep tan, I couldn't tell. A simple black dress. No shoes. No nail polish. A sash around her waist that almost hid a pack of cigs shoved in at the left side. Her head was tilted, chin out, as if looking up at someone. A thin smile that could have been caution or control. The way she sat I found strange, her torso almost curved inward so that it made her seem like a puzzle piece lacking its mate. She held something even greener than the background, but someone - the murderer I guessed - had scratched it out with a knife. It could have been a book; at least, she held it like a book, although there was something too fleshy about the hints of it still left on the canvas.

For a mistaken moment, I thought I'd found the missing girl. For a moment, I thought I'd found something even more important.

I looked around the apartment a bit, but my gaze kept coming back to the painting. It was signed in the corner: "Farid Sabouri."

I kept thinking, Why did they defile the painting?

After a while, the police deputy asked me in his imperfect English, "You know what happen? Who?"

Somewhere in this rat's warren of apartments there was probably a man whose wife or daughter the artist had been screwing. Or someone he owed a lot of money to. Or just a psychopath. You get used to the options after a while. They aren't complicated.