The Heavy Bear

Prologue

— Prologue —

I SENSED SOMEONE standing beside my bed and flung the sheets back. But no menacing figure, knife in hand, loomed over me. At first I saw only the empty darkness. Then the walls and the dresser emerged from the murk, and I was peering through an undersea camera at the ruins of the Titanic, the forgotten contours of some vaguely familiar life. I sat bolt upright. The bottom half of a body still hung in the window, as if frozen in ice. I tried to cry out, but the silence, much heavier than any I’d ever known, drowned the words in my throat.

The body slid out into the greater darkness. A low growl accompanied the departure, immediately followed by a powerful, mysterious odour – rank, wild. The kind of smell I hadn’t experienced since my youth on the Fraser River over a Christ’s lifetime ago.

A hatful of moonlight splashed on the hardwood floor, the wild smell faded and I was just a middle-aged father and husband again. I pushed the little button to illuminate my watch-face. One o’clock. Someone – or something – had been in my bedroom in the middle of the night. Why? To steal? I dismissed the idea at once. I didn’t know why, but the intrusion felt more personal than any random act of thievery.

Careful not to disturb my wife, I quickly rose, dressed and, with my pulse still pounding, followed the figure through the open ground-floor window.

All around me the air flowed like fragranced bathwater. The scent of the neighbour’s freshly cut grass filled my nostrils, while the cathedral beams of our block’s towering Dutch elms overwhelmed my eyes. Parked cars formed a resting train below the leafy branches and one porch light along the avenue held a vortex of bugs against the night. Even inner-city neighbourhoods at this hour sometimes possess a deep rural calm. If a pampered house cat had been on the loose, I could have heard its tympanic paw-fall over the flower beds.

Instead, I heard only my own breathing as I hurried across the lawn to the cracked sidewalk. Of course, I expected to see no one – even intruders who linger strangely in open windows don’t hang around to be caught and interrogated. So, the sight of a slight man in baggy trousers, a shirt of moonlight and an old-fashioned hat standing half a block away caught me unawares, to say the least. He seemed oddly familiar, though probably only because he stood no more than five foot five – my late father’s height. Again, for some curious reason, my voice failed, as if I no longer had one. Instead, I waved my arms in what I intended to be a threatening manner, but the figure, whose face I could not make out, appeared to be waiting for me. As I came within fifty yards, however, the little man vanished. At that point, I took a deep breath and began to orient myself, to be the rational adult of the ultra-rational twenty-first century.

Dreams. Fancies. The phantoms and illusions brought on by stress. The truth was, I had slept fitfully for several weeks, as I generally did in advance of the university year when, as an itinerant lecturer in English, I steeled myself to meet a hundred young people and steer them, often against their will, down the corridors of syntax and through the abundant meadows of metaphor. It was pleasant enough work, but a shy middle-aged man with some talent for language is still a shy middle-aged man, and meeting humans for the shy is the same as it is for a spider or a coyote: a matter of no inconsiderable anxiety. But why cavil? I was a nervous, over-sensitive man who had reached an age of reckoning: I had more time behind me now than ahead, and the future looked increasingly untender, for my own three children and everyone else’s. At almost fifty, I had become both disillusioned and anxious. So it was hardly surprising, then, that I should conjure up phantoms from the tangle of my nerve endings.

Yet, when I reached the end of the block, I already knew that the little man wasn’t gone for good. And when the low growl sounded at my back, and the wild odour – a concoction of woodsmoke and salmon spawn – filled my nostrils as I turned, I understood that my world had shifted, and whether I still inhabited what the media considered reality didn’t much matter.

Approaching the central north–south corridor of 99th Street which was about as busy as a supermarket aisle after closing I looked up and saw, forty yards away, my mysterious quarry. Except now he wasn’t on the ground. He tiptoed, with astonishing agility, along a telephone wire, his absurdly large shoes flapping silently. He didn’t even hold his arms out for balance. His shirt front blazed whitely against the faded confetti of stars. Oddly enough, there was no moon and no moonlight. So, what had splashed into my bedroom?

With each step that I took, the little man took three; and as I increased my pace, he increased his. Soon we were both sprinting, my feet hardly more secure on the ground than his on the wire. How was it that he didn’t fall? How was it that his tiny crushed hat didn’t fly off? The houses of my neighbours slid away like trains on parallel tracks leaving the same station. By the time I stood, panting, under the 99th Street telephone wire, the little man had vanished again.

I looked to the south and back to the north. No one. And not even one moving car. I watched the intersection lights on Whyte Avenue change from red to green to yellow and back to red again. Then I watched the whole process once more. Strange – the signals blinking on and off without anyone to heed them. Like a movie running in an empty theatre without even the projectionist in the booth.

That was exactly how the knowledge struck me – not all at once, but in the meticulously timed cuts of the traffic lights. Was it strange that an image solved the mystery? Perhaps. But I had been a working poet for much longer than I’d been a father or a teacher, and the confluence of imagination, truth and mystery had never been an alien force in my life.

“Working? Fat chance, chum,” grumbled a voice from right behind me.

I whirled around to find the same visual emptiness, but the wild odour took me under the armpits and almost lifted me off the ground. It wasn’t an offensive smell exactly, but powerful as a river at freshet. Chum? I didn’t speak like that, not even in my dream world. What was next, 23 skidoo?

When I turned back to the intersection lights, the red blazing like the torched eye of Polyphemus, I wanted desperately for the little man in baggy trousers to reappear. Because by now I knew exactly who he was, and I also knew I was as sane as any man in the twenty-first century can expect to be, dragging the bloodied pelt of the twentieth century behind him. The game’s afoot, I would have said to Watson as I filled my meerschaum pipe, if I’d had a Watson to confide in.

But I had no companion in the summer dark except for the ghost of a long-dead funny man and a disembodied growl and a wild smell I recognized but couldn’t name.

I turned and slowly retraced my steps, my body continually in the moving spotlight of the moon. But the strange thing was, the night remained moonless, and whenever I stopped and looked around for the little man, I saw only the shadows of trees and houses, and heard only a ghostly tinkle of breeze along the trembling tightrope where he had balanced so beautifully, up there with all the other lost voices.