The Third Bear (46 page)

I stopped bathing entirely. I wore the same clothes for weeks. Her skin's briny taste filled my mouth no matter what cup I drank from. Her eyes stared from every corner.

"What did you do then?" my guest would prod once again. He'd have finished his tea by now and he would be wanting to leave, but ask despite himself.

"Don't you know, Lucius?" I'd reply. "Don't you remember?"

"Tell me anyway," he'd say, to humor the other crazy old man.

"One night, sick with weariness, with heartache, I took the arm to the medical school's operating theater and performed surgery on myself."

A rapid intake of breath. "You did?"

"No, of course not. You can't perform that kind of surgery on yourself. Impossible. Besides, the operating theater has students and doctors in it day and night. You can't sneak into an operating theater the way you sneak into a cadaver room. Too many living people to see you."

"Oh," he'd say, and lapse into silence.

Maybe that's all I'd be willing to tell my Lucius surrogate. Maybe that's the end of the story for him.

One night, sick with weariness, with heartache, I took the arm to the medical school's operating theater and performed surgery on myself.

It wasn't the operating theater and I wasn't alone. No, my friend was with me the whole time.

Me, tossing the proverbial pebbles from some romantic play at the window of Lucius' new apartment one desperate, sleepless night. Hissing as loud as I could: "Lucius! I know you're in there!"

More pebbles, more hissing, and then he, finally, reluctantly, opening the window. In the light pouring out, I could see a woman behind him, blonde and young, clutching a bedsheet.

Lucius stared down at me as if I were an anonymous beggar.

"Come down, Lucius," I said. "Just for a moment."

It was a rich neighborhood, not where one typically finds starving medical students. Not the kind of street where any resident wants a scene.

"What do you want?" he hissed down at me.

"Just come down. I won't leave until you do."

Again, that measured stare. Suddenly I was afraid.

He scowled and closed the window, but a minute later he stood in the shadow of the doorway with me, his hair disheveled, his eyes slits. He reeked of beer.

"You look half-dead," he said. "Do you need money? Will that make you go away?"

Even a few days earlier that would have hurt me.

"I need you to come down to the medical school."

"Not in a million years. We're done. We're through."

I took the arm out of my satchel and unwrapped it from the gauze in which it writhed.

Lucius backed away, against the door, as I proffered it to him. He put out his hand to push it away, thought better of that.

"She came back to me. I burned the body, but the arm came back."

"My god, what were you thinking? Put it away. Now."

I carefully rewrapped it, put it back in the satchel. The point had been made.

"So you'll help me?"

"No. Take that abomination and leave now."

He turned to open the door.

I said: "I need your help. If you don't help, I'll go to the medical school board, show them the arm, and tell them your role in this." There was a wound in me because of Lucius. Part of me wanted to hurt him. Badly.

Lucius stopped with his hand on the doorknob, his back to me. I knew he was searching furiously for an escape.

"You can help me or you can kill me, Lucius," I said, "but I'm not going away."

Finally, his shoulders slumped and he stared out into the night.

"I'll help, all right? I'll help. But if you ever come here again after this,

He didn't need to say it. I knew exactly what he was capable of.

My parents had a hard life. I didn't see this usually, but at times I would catch hints of it. Preservation was a taxing combination of intuition, experimentation, and magic. It wasn't just the physical cost - my mother's wrists aching from hundreds of hours of grinding the pestle in the mortar, my father's back throbbing from hauling buckets out of the boat nearly every day. The late hours, the dead-end ideas that resulted in nothing they could sell. The stress of going out in a cockleshell of a boat in seas that could grow sullen and rough in minutes.

No, preservation came with a greater cost than that. My parents aged faster than normal - well-preserved, of course, even healthy, perhaps, but the wrinkles gathered more quickly on their faces, as did the age spots I thought were acid blotches and that they tried to disguise or hide. None of this was normal, although I could not know it at the time. I had no other parents to compare them to or examine as closely.

Once, I remember hearing their voices in the kitchen. Something in their tone made me walk close enough to listen, but not close enough to be seen.

You must slow down," she said to him.

"I can't. So many want so much."

"Then let them want. Let them go without."

"Maybe it's an addiction. Giving them what they want." "I want you with me, my dear, not down in the basement of the Preservation Guild waiting for a resurrection that will never come."

"I'll try...I'll be better..."

"...Look at my hands..."

"...I love your hands..."

"...so dry, so old..."

"They're the hands of someone who works for a living."

"Works too hard."

"I'll try. I'll try."

III.

I'll try. I'll try. To tell the rest of the story. To make it to the end. Some moments are more difficult than others, and you never know which are which until it's too late.

When Lucius discovered what I planned to do, he called me crazy. He called me reckless and insane. I just stood there and let him pace and curse at me. It hardly mattered. I was resolute in my decision.

"Lucius," I said. "You can make this hard or you can make this easy. You can make it last longer or you can make it short."

"I wish I'd never known you," he said to me. "I wish I'd never introduced you to my friends."

In the end, my calm won him over. Knowing what I had to do, the nervousness had left me. I had reached a state so beyond that of normal human existence, so beyond what even Lucius could imagine, that I had achieved perfect clarity. I can't explain it any other way. The doubt, in that moment, had fallen from me.

"So you'll do it?" I asked again.

"Let's get on with it," Lucius growled, through gritted teeth, "But not at the operating theater. That's madness. There's a place outside the city. A house my father owns. You'll wait for me there. I'll get the tools and supplies I need from the school."

Desperation, lack of sleep, and a handful of pills Lucius had been able to steal served as my only anesthetics. I had no idea, even with Lucius' help, even with my knowledge of preservation powders, if it would work. In effect, it might have been the equivalent of an assisted suicide attempt. I lay spread out on a tarp covering the long dining room table of that house while Lucius prepared his instruments, knowing that these minutes, these seconds, might be my last among the living.

The pain was unbelievable. I jolted in and out of consciousness to hear Lucius panting like a dog. Lucius sawing. Lucius cursing. Lucius cutting and suturing and weeping, blood everywhere, me delirious and singing an old nursery rhyme my mother had taught me, Lucius bellowing his distress in counterpoint.

"I never want to see you again," he gasped in my ear as he finished up. "Never."

I smiled up at him and reached out with my good arm to touch his bloodstained face, to say thank you, though no words came out. The pain burned through my skull like a wildfire. The pain was telling me I was alive.

When Lucius was done, he slumped against the side of the table, wiping at his hands, mumbling something I couldn't understand. It wasn't important. All I knew was that my own right arm had been consigned to the morgue and the woman's arm had replaced my own.

Lucius saw to it that I got back to my apartment, although all I have are vague flashbacks to the inside of a cart and a painful rolling sensation. Afterward I spent two feverish weeks in bed, the landlady knocking on the door every day, asking for the rent. I think Lucius visited me to clean and check the wound, but I can't be sure.

My memory of that time comes and goes in phases like the tide.