BEAR MAZE!

The Book

Excerpt

Trivia

EXCERPT

Kapitel Eins: Bear Aid

He was a man of simple passions. As an eternal and abiding principle of his life, that was always true. His wife would have said that he was complex, so would all of the people that had once been his friends or colleagues, and most certainly his children, who were still too young to understand that he was a person. But he knew that they were all wrong. When he sat in his work chair, like he was that evening, there was nothing complex about his motivations. He was simply a man trying to do work. The work was complicated, but that was beside the point.

It was his misfortune that his spiritual simplicity was mirrored in his physical health. He envied the physically complex man, who could fall apart in stages, the type of man that aged in a probabilistic manner—for example, in that man’s forties, his body would decide it had no affinity for physical exertion, later his head would randomly and independently go bald without consulting anybody, and his knees would retire in their fifties, even though his feet had aspirations yet. Such a man could have, in his nineties, a brain entirely in its youth, perhaps twelve years old, saved from ever experiencing the travails of puberty when his heart would suddenly fail and take everything down with it. That man was lucky. When the body of Daedalus decided to become old it did so collectively, it made a simple, unitary assertion—‘we will be old!’ All at once his back hurt, his sight and hearing evaporated, wrinkles appeared under his eyes, and a pallid grey asserted itself all over his body, to the point where he looked dead when he was sleeping.

He was a man trying to do work, he reminded himself. He started to wonder whether having a table in front of him would have positively altered his life in a meaningful way, if it would have made the difference between a successful night and slowly becoming a human plateau. Instead of on a table, his workbook lay in his lap, which was very lacking as far as level wooden surfaces went. The open pages of his workbook were slowly becoming black, but not because he had written or drawn anything in them. It was getting late. As if night was a satisfactory response to the demands of the empty page, he tenderly closed the book. His mind had become useless to him several hours before, and although he distinctly knew that to be the case he sat there anyway, lamenting its loss. Distracted and thinking about tables.

The book was a leather-bound collection of artifices, of alchemy and sadism, of formulas and carpentry. At least insofar as any of those things could be represented on paper. He found that sadism was easy to depict, and carpentry was much harder. After years of practicing technical drawing, he was still dissatisfied with every two-dimensional blueprint that he made, even for the simplest things. Carpentry needed to be embodied to do it any justice, he felt. But he didn’t have tools anymore, so he tried to let it go.

Lately he had been conspicuously occupied by mazes, an obsession which mentally took him back to the time and place he had built his house. Then too he had been utterly fascinated with mazes, not merely with their construction but also with the worldview of a maze, their maxims, assumptions, their ethics, viabilities.

It had cost his wife a great deal of persuasion to get him not to build their house as a maze. He gave her a very long list of good reasons why a maze was the best place to live, but she wasn’t convinced by any of them. His wife preferred the life of a castle, or at least the feeling of one, so would settle for nothing less than the most austere, practical, regal house that he could make. That was one of the first indications he was given, that he and his wife were two entirely different people. He hated ostentation. He would have much preferred to live in the dungeon of her fantastical castle, he would have preferred to build a house that extracted a castle’s subterranean, its dark recesses and disjointedness, its loneliness. A house that celebrated obscurity. Like a real dungeon, it would have had the magnificent and suffocating presence of a castle on top of it, but nothing his wife would have been able to live in. He merely would have conveyed the essence of a castle above, with lumber and geometry. A real castle would have been unnecessary. He tried to think about how he would have accomplished the effect, but even his thoughts didn’t do justice to carpentry either—he knew he could have built what he had in mind, but he would never be able to mentally possess it unless he built it. But it was in the past. Conjugal commitments said no.

Still the spectral taste of his maze lingered on his tongue, taunted him. He would have found solace in its abstruse core, in the miles of unlit obscurity that would have separated him from the world. In its actual form, the way he finally ended up building their house, he had difficulty finding peace. A man could simply stroll from the entrance to the master bedroom, if he had a mind to. If he didn’t have a mind, he could probably have done the same. The aftertaste turned bitter and he desperately needed to stand up.

Already the night was impressively dark, and so was the room he was in, since he hadn’t lit any candles. His workroom was the parlor of the house, which adjoined the foyer. From the foyer there was a staircase, or a short hallway to either the kitchen or his bedroom. The parlor contained bookcases, his chair, and a grand window that opened to the night sky, which was currently the object of salutary neglect by a new moon and a weak display of stars. He fumbled to put the book on a bookshelf, and he turned over again an hourglass on the window sill as he gazed outward at nothing at all.

He did the best he could to put mazes out of his head, but they wouldn’t leave. Giving up, he decided it would be best to retire for the night. Through the absolute darkness of his house he easily, to his distaste, navigated to the door of his bedroom, where he paused. On the other side he could hear the light but audible breathing of his wife as she slept.

He loved his wife dearly, but he could not sleep next to her. He wasn’t sure if it even had anything to do with her. For the past several months he had been having the worst of nightmares. They were worse than normal nightmares, worse than confronting his fears in the depths of unconsciousness, because at least such dreams would have been restful, if unsettling. His type of nightmares were half waking, they denied him the rest of sleep but also the presence of mind of waking. They were seeds of slumber that germinated into impostors of conscious thought, and so were creatures of purgatory. Whether waking life was heaven or hell he didn’t know, but purgatory remained the same. For instance, a dream-thought would suddenly occur to him that all shapes had a unique and exact number associated with them. And, to understand any spatial thing at all, those numbers had to be added together. That was the seed. He would then dream of encountering a person. He wanted to know them. What innumerable problems he ran into, right away! Into what shapes was a person to be decomposed? The face was an oval, sure, but it was also more than that. And even if it was just an oval, what was the number associated with it? It was not the length of the semi-major axis, not its circumference—it was something much deeper and more intrinsic than that, so that he couldn’t be satisfied with any obvious answer. Thus even his simplifications were incapable of being resolved, and yet his feverish mind considered not just the oval of the face, but everything at once. The strain would wake him up, but even then he struggled with the problem, and drifted back. Another example was trying to divide a sentence by the word the. He would formulate all the rules of division, maybe, and would break himself for an entire night trying to apply them in his sleep. It was oddly out of his control, and strangely lacking in the visual aspects of dreams as he knew them, so was driving him insane.

Standing at the doorway of his bedroom, he changed his mind. He turned back around, and walked away from the door and the vague confusion that the night would have brought him. Thoughts of mazes resurfaced—he couldn’t help but feeling like he was in one, even in his simple house, and that within ten steps of the entrance he had already run into a dead-end. He felt that if he returned to his work chair, he would at least have the benefit of being at the start again, with no progress made but the potential of a correct solution ahead of him.

Slowly, he returned to the beginning. He sat down. The chair was leather—he had killed the cow himself, had analyzed the personalities of a whole herd of cows until he knew he had found a tender, longsuffering cow with doleful eyes, which he considered at the time to be good qualities in a chair. There had been a complication involved, he remembered, killing the cow. The knife he used had been too small. It had been embarrassing for him, as a scientist, to underestimate the thickness of a cow’s neck. But even a small knife worked in the end, when wielded by pride.

From the vantage of his chair he looked once more outward. If not for the three lamps visible from where he was, surrogate celestial bodies maintained by the city of Gibeah, he would have been able to see nothing of the outside world. They emitted a slow river of light, on the banks of which would be one of the roads that led out of Gibeah. The light farthest to his right was very near one of the gates that monitored the exchange between civilization and wilderness, and the other two went toward the city.

As he watched, the light by the gate gave up its dissembling of a river, by acting in a way a river never could—it simply disappeared. He had been ready to dismiss it, to write it off as the consequence of an overzealous breeze, since the lamps were well protected from the whims of the wind but were by no means infallible, when two minutes later the middle light went out as well. Something was happening. A tree by the only remaining light, its foliage close around it, indicated with its stillness that no torrential wind existed outside. The agent must have been something else. He sat up straight, he stared piercingly into the darkness, as if his sight hadn’t been failing him.

Something in him knew, with a power beyond conviction, that he was at the last crucial juncture of his life. That if he went back to his room and prayed for a good night’s sleep, there was possibly a way back to simplicity again, pure and forgiving. That if he went outside, where his heart pulled, the way back would forever be cut off from him. That he really did stand at the beginning of the maze that he envisioned before, but he had misjudged its nature. The hourglass had not yet emptied, but he turned it over once more, and went to the foyer. There he opened the front door and, feeling the visceral cold of the air, reconsidered. He closed the door and went to his closet, where he put on a heavy coat. In the kitchen he found a candle and some matches. Once more in the parlor he felt much less confident than he had just seconds before—the candle seemed entirely inadequate to him, too reminiscent of all the lamps he had just seen fail. So he set it on a shelf and searched out his dictionary, where he kept his most valuable things. Between pages, a quarter of the way through the book, were four strands of hair, long and golden. He tied them in a loop, and placed them on top of his head like a halo. It also occurred to him to take a long straightedge ruler that he used on the rare occasion that his mazes utilized straight lines. He placed his head against the door of his bedroom one last time, listening to the breathing of his wife—then he was off.

The night was like the dreams he hadn’t been having lately. It was unconsciousness, disclosed in the shape of a world—everything dark, everything cold. And just as he would have welcomed sleep, he welcomed the world and the challenge it brought, since he really couldn’t see that much of anything. The third and final lamplight was still lit, far off in the distance, and he set off in its direction. It was the only stable object in his otherwise defunct vision. All the other things around him, the trees, the rocks, and a few statues he had made, were only selectively highlighted by the faraway light. They were unstable, they flickered and changed, they disappeared and reappeared in front of him like ghosts. Still, it was enough light that he could move forward.

Then the final light was taken from him, even as he watched. It went the way of the two lights before it, and there was a horrendous darkness surrounding him, the likes of which he had never experienced, and likely never would again. But it wasn’t enough to entirely discomfit him as it might have some other person, because his environment had become remarkably reminiscent of the dungeons he had just been longing for, not minutes prior. The only thing betraying the illusion was the mercilessly fresh breeze that would have been much danker in a dungeon, after being filtered through the sediment of deep earth and decrepit bodies. Also, even an ephemeral light was more the essence of a dungeon, at least by Daedalus’ conception; the light of faint hope, of the outside world, which made its ever-so-seductive trip inward—that was more befitting of a dungeon, to Daedalus.

So his spirit didn’t entirely leave him—he came to a stop, and tried his hand at listening. Nothing but dead branches scraping, with the last clinging dead leaves of a bygone florid time, were to be heard. Truly a blind man, he did the best he could to conjure an internal map of his yard as he remembered it. It was a complexity he warmly received, in contrast as it was to the earlier simplicity of his house. Theoretically he could have used his ruler to probe about in front of him in further imitation of a blind man, but he didn’t consider that an option, since it was his favorite ruler and he did not want to compromise its straightness by any misdirected swinging. So he held it under his right armpit and extended his hands forward slightly, at the very least not wishing to sacrifice his face in the ordeal. Reassured by the thorough silence around him, minus the trees, he took his first step since the loss of the final lamp. He immediately tripped over what must have been a wire, which resolutely deposited him on its other side. He chose not to react with his arms, nor to attempt to recover with his feet, and so ended up lying entirely prostrate on the ground, face down, with the ruler extending heavenward like an arrow from his back.

Accompanying his fall had been laughter. Partly, his inadequate response to falling had been sheer indifference, but it was also partly that he had been arrested by the sound of the laughter, so synchronous to his fall. As much as it would have been in his nature to do so, the wire was not put in the yard by his hand. He could also think of nothing that should have been laughing at him falling.

It had been a light, melodic laughter, the kind that left nothing in the air after it was gone. Very near.

He took advantage of his position—already reminiscent of supplication—to pray, there on top of the somewhat gravelly turf of his yard. The first and last words were holy and unchangeable, repeated ever since his childhood. Everything in between allowed for invention. “Ich bin verrucht. Apollo, protector of order and progenitor of all things lawful, thy humble servant beseeches thee, to be my guide in this, my time of need, to mortify those that would stand in opposition. Immer sein Kind.” With the last words a soft glow began to radiate from his head, from where he had placed the four strands of hair. It wasn’t nearly enough to illuminate the world, but he could see his hands if he held them to his face, and they were a welcome sight.

Rising to his feet, he proceeded just as deliberately as before, one short blind step after another. With his hands he brandished the ruler in somewhat of an offensive manner, relying on the providential light from his head to forewarn immediate collisions. Still, his sides were too removed from its sphere of influence to prevent him from bumping into a tree with his right shoulder, which provoked another series of laughter. Recovering quickly he took a single strand of hair into the curve of his left index finger, and broke it from its place atop his head by pulling outward. An intense burst of light emitted coarsely through his yard, interrupting the laughter mid-flight and illuminating everything, albeit only for a second. Enough for him to realize he had been wrong about where he was, and to correct to his left a fair degree. Again he brushed a tree, again the laughter, but it had become more frantic, and he broke another strand to silence it.

His yard suddenly ended under his feet, giving way meekly into the cobblestone road that began at the east gate. Further along to the west, the road branched into two directions, one branch leading mostly to the cemetery, but with further divisions to accommodate other subsidiary destinations. The other branch led to the town proper. The third lamp, the last one to be extinguished, was situated where the two branches diverged. He increased his pace proportionately to the surety gained by being on a road, and came quickly upon the intersection.

Sounds of movement were ahead of him, footsteps of several people hurrying away. A bit of theatricality entered Daedalus’ head. Loudly, with a confidence that startled even himself for its inexplicable appearance, he said, “Someone explain to me at once what is going on here!” He broke another strand, both to make an impression and to see anything at all, especially their reaction. The meandering light of a distant fourth lamp was slowly making things visible in a diffuse way, but it wasn’t enough for him to make out any details.

Whatever their initial reaction to his voice was, when the light hit them it was to show a group of people running away, although two of them were largely inhibited by a ladder. The two seemed to refuse to drop their burden, but couldn’t coordinate well enough between themselves to go fast with it. They were arguing in whispers, when Daedalus overtook them with his measuring stick.

“You’ll explain yourselves!” he shouted. And, to the end of making a convincing argument, he lashed out at the nearest one. The stick caught the man flat across the top of his head, and probably didn’t hurt so much, but it did inspire more conversation from the group. Daedalus was finally close enough to hear the exchange, and repeated the lashing motion throughout the course of it.

“And now there’s an angel with a stick here, making inquiries,” one said to the other, still in an only barely restrained whisper. “As if I didn’t already feel uneasy about the whole affair. Should we—ah—explain to him?” He grunted when Daedalus hit him again.

“What do you mean, ‘should we explain to him?’ Of course not. This is all a secret, angel or no angel.”

“Well that’s easy for you to say, seeing as he’s over here whaling away at me, and not you, like I was some sort of threshing needing done.” At that point they entirely dropped their load, in order to more fully engage in debate.

“There wasn’t supposed to be any witnesses! But now that there is, we’re just going to have to make the best of it! What do you expect me to do?”

Daedalus struck again, even though it didn’t seem to affect much. The one man continued, “Ah! Now that one really hurt! The least you could do is trade me, then I wouldn’t mind much going on our merry way and all.” And they did. The man Daedalus had been physically remonstrating switched sides with the other, and they resumed their burden, along with their old pace. The multitude of stores that now lined the street provided a small amount of light here and there, with the cumulative effect that the scene was finally readily apparent.

Daedalus wasn’t to be deterred by such a strange yet egalitarian turn around, but rather picked up where he left off as well. That time as he struck, he caught the fresh man with the edge of the ruler, instead of the flat side. If the lighting was sufficient, and had one cared to know, it could have been observed by the markings on the ruler that it was embedded a solid 1/16 of a cubit into the man’s right shoulder, at its deepest point.

“Aghh!” the previous whisper was finally abandoned in the expression of pain. “No, I won’t be having any of this!” he yelled, and dropped his side of the burden to run headlong after the others, who were a considerable distance ahead, the ruler making a fleshy suction sound as he pulled away from it.

The remaining man must have felt some strong obligation to carry the ladder to its destination anyway, with or without aid. He did not join the others in fleeing, but instead made his best effort at dragging the ladder, since it was too unwieldy for easy conveyance by one person.

Daedalus switched tactics. “I’ll help you carry it, if you can tell me exactly what it is you’ve been up to?” The man remaining had already shown willingness to cooperate with him, to escape from the beating, if the other man hadn’t insisted on the secrecy of their mission. So the approach seemed plausible.

He could see the man warring inside of his head, and it seemed he might concede to Daedalus’ offer, but when he finally answered, it was to say, “No, that one there was likely right, I’ve been sworn to secrecy, and this really isn’t so bad after all. I’m moving along just fine, if you can see.”

Daedalus’ motivation to pursue was waning quickly, although he still had a fair amount of curiosity as to what was happening. In the end, though, the waning got the better of him. As suspicious as all of it was, it seemed as though he’d done more harm than they had, him with his bloody ruler. He bid the man farewell, and went to investigate one more thing before retiring to his house.

The city wall, and the east gate where the road intersected it, was only a quarter of a mile past his house.

His property was far removed from the norm of the city, the land he was allotted being a good ten times larger than that of anyone but the King himself. Daedalus was granted the land back when he had favor—his allotment was proportionate to the respect he had commanded. That was a general principle, which was the reason that every other inhabitant of the city—one hundred thousand by some estimates, considered lowlifes all—had hardly enough to exist on. At certain times of diffidence he would consider apportioning out pieces of his land to those that would make better use of it, but he realized that it was never a reasonable thought. If he gave everything he had, it would have only helped a limited amount of people, and it would have been just as easy and much more effective to extend the city wall, to relieve some of the bulging that the population did against it. Quite possibly it was just how conspicuous his house was that troubled Daedalus at night. He didn’t need the insight of his occupation to know the problems of being conspicuous.

Familiarity told him that he had neared the gate, nothing else. The last strand of hair on his head had nearly faded, and, in the resumed darkness of the vicinity of his house, most of what Daedalus could see was only afterimages burned into his retina from the bursts of light. Only a small light, escaping through the cracks of the guard shack’s door in what seemed to him ominously portentous ways, indicated that he had found the right place. He passed the guard shack and walked up to inspect the gate first.

He could only imagine that, years from then, the portcullis would be rusty and real, real in the way of things that decayed over time. But the bars still wore the veneer of artifice, were still unmistakably made. At least that was the impression he got by touching them, which was all he had to go by at the moment. Their artificial feeling could be explained by the fact that the gate and the wall that housed it were new additions to the city. Only some five years before—it hadn’t been necessary until then. When it did become necessary, though, the job was given to some inadequate fool that vastly underestimated the human proclivity to procreate, most likely because he was so gawkily inadequate that he was universally excluded from that rite of procreation himself. That lack of foresight had caused the Gibeahn housing problem, at such a pitch just five years later! The houses were already built all the way into the walls themselves, welling up to extreme heights where they met its resistance, throughout the entire circumference of the city. Minus one conspicuous point.

The portcullis was firmly closed, and reassuringly locked. The only way to release the lock was in the guard shack itself, which was why Daedalus feared for the safety of the sentry. Due to Daedalus’ living so close to one of the city’s entrances—there were only three in all—he had made the acquaintance of most anyone that would ever operate the gate. Just by proximity. On some nights he would make extended conversation with the usual night guard, Wallace. He was the one who Daedalus feared for.

“Wallace?” he said, as he soundly knocked on the door. A startled noise ensued from inside, and the sound of feet rapidly hitting the floor. Daedalus knew it by intuition to be the sound of a man caught sleeping when he shouldn’t. The same thing that made Wallace so amicable to Daedalus made him occupationally defective, and that was Wallace’s advanced age. In a dire situation, it was likely that Wallace could not actually perform any of the duties that would then be incumbent on him. But since he’d had the job so long, either no one remembered to reevaluate his worthiness, or no one had the heart to fire him, hoping instead that his death would come before the next emergency, and they could then quietly replace him with a clean conscience. There was a great likelihood that they were experiencing that next emergency, Daedalus thought, and also a great likelihood that the sound behind the door was Wallace not being dead and quietly replaced.

The door opened from the inside, and a warm, wrinkled face presented itself, amidst a light that nearly blinded Daedalus after being in so much darkness. “Is that you, Marcus?” Wallace asked. “I recognized by the voice, come in! It is deathly cold out there.”

Daedalus, often fondly and mistakenly called Marcus by the old man, was more than happy to oblige.

A hearth, large in relation to the size of the room, was intensely ablaze, radiating an excess of warmth. The fire, the quaint wooden furniture that furnished the place, and the compact size that concentrated all of those elements potently, lent such a coziness to the place that Daedalus could easily forgive Wallace for being put to sleep by it. It was unfair to sing lullabies to a child, then chastise it for falling asleep, Daedalus thought. Unless it was expedient to do so—Daedalus waved away all the pleasantries that usually accompanied his visits, to get to the heart of the matter. “You haven’t seen any unusual activity lately, have you Wallace? Did you open the gate for anyone?” The likely answer would be that Wallace hadn’t done either of those things, for being insensate in sleep. The group of men would have been there only fifteen minutes before, which wouldn’t have left Wallace much time between dealing with them and going to bed. Unless he had the extraordinary ability of instantly dozing off at work, the envy of an insomniac like Daedalus.

“Speaking of all that,” Wallace replied, “there was a time… oh, it couldn’t have been but twenty years ago—my, what strange things time does, what errantry!—none other than King Gideon himself I believe, or was it Jerubbaal? rode up to these very gates. Demanding bread, or something like that—”

“This happens to be an exceptionally pressing matter, if you could just please—”

“A pressing matter! If you think this is pressing, then you haven’t seen anything! How old were you when Abimelech took the city? You would have been just a lad, if I’m not mistaken, so you most likely wouldn’t recall—”

“Excuse me.” Daedalus had never tried not reminiscing with the man, and now that he had, he recognized the impossibility. “As it turns out, I have other things to attend to. I bid you farewell, Wallace. And we will speak again soon.”

“So soon, you’re leaving? Do come back, if you get the opportunity… no one listens like you do.”

Daedalus hesitated for a second in departing, to look Wallace once more in the face, after the unexpected, pleading admission by the old man. The wrinkles of Wallace’s face somehow worked together to conjure the epitome of piteous expression, and Daedalus realized that he wasn’t truly looking at Wallace then, but only his soul, exposed perhaps for the first time ever in the most vulnerable of places, the human face.

“I…” Daedalus didn’t know how to walk away from that expression. “Don’t have the time right now.” He left anyway. The cold outside seemed even harsher than before, and Daedalus felt like he was breathing in the essence of life itself, the way it stung so badly. In a good way.

He investigated the gate one more time, the best he could with his hands. He couldn’t think of what the telltale signs might have been, if it was recently opened—but definite was the fact that it was closed again. He made his way tactilely back to his house.

An inexplicable amount of lights were on in his house, which was apparent very early in his return. They shone out of the great window from the room he had just recently been in, where he had looked inquisitively out toward where he was then approaching from. No one in his house should have been awake, or lighting lights. The revelation caused him to make haste in his return.

His front door was ajar. He’d spent long hours just sitting in his parlor, slowly and subconsciously memorizing the habitual place of everything that surrounded him, so that he immediately recognized that certain things of his had been unusually disturbed. Namely his hourglass, which had been turned over again, a grain of sand stubbornly stopping the vortex, and his chair, which had been rotated a few degrees. He was growing more agitated by the minute until he heard voices in his kitchen that were familiar, and perhaps capable of explaining what had happened. He laid the last depleted strand of hair around the hourglass, before cautiously making the simple way between the parlor and the kitchen.

His wife came into view first, leaning tensely against one of the counters that graced three sides of the kitchen. She was already looking in his direction, in anticipation of his arrival. The cabinets around her were in complete disarray, to a much larger degree than his parlor had been, with doors torn off and mud on the floor. Daedalus took the damage all in stride. Next to appear was David, whose shoulders were erect with the self-aware confidence of a protector, as he stood on the opposite side of the room as Bathsheba, Daedalus’ wife. He was not visible until Daedalus had fully entered the room. Normally a bitter rage would have momentarily incapacitated Daedalus at the point of sudden discovery, but from hearing the voices he had had a suspicion, and was therefore able to surmount a much easier to manage, slowly gathering, contemplative rage. The two of them stared mutely at him, as if he had interrupted just by being there, and was therefore obligated to make amends to the conversation. “David, what brings you here, at an hour like this?” he tried.

The man replied, “There’s been a Bear Raid, Daedalus. While you were out, gods know where, neglecting your household, the half of your foodstuffs has been taken.”

“I was making investigations—”

“Yes, that is something you do often enough. Looks like you were measuring something, wonderful.” The ruler was still in Daedalus’ hands, in case of an emergency. “But what you have to realize, my good friend, is that your family needs providing for, and this takes precedence over your experiments.

“But anyway,” he said, before resuming what he must have been saying before Daedalus had intervened, “there I was, lying my children to sleep, and about to go to bed myself, when I heard bears roaring from somewhere in the distance. Immediately it occurred to me that Bathsheba might be in danger, as the sounds were from this general direction, so I made all haste to get here as soon as possible. By the time I arrived, the damage was already done. The bears had taken all they could manage to carry away, which you are very fortunate did not include your wife, Daedalus. It’s a shame, really—had bears still been here, I would have been more than willing to fend them off. This, what I’m expressing, is a noble feeling, and one you should really emulate yourself, Daedalus”

The fact that David, from where he lived a far distance off, had heard the rioting sounds of bears that Daedalus had not, struck him as entirely improbable and odd. But the evidence of the kitchen was undeniable, since the pantry door was completely absent, along with most everything formerly inside of it. Yet Daedalus wasn’t looking at David, or his destroyed furniture, or his own remaining foodstuffs, as all of those things were accounted for and easily replaceable. Instead he looked constantly at his wife, so was able to witness the gradual forming of a warm smile that only employed the corners of her mouth. It was very subtle, although discernible to the keen eye. Daedalus generally had a keen eye, when he was close enough to see, but that didn’t explain everything—a keen eye for fishing dried away to nothing on firm land, as the proverb went. As for the current sharpness of his eye, it had been made keen by certain experiments he’d done in ornithology. His wife’s smile was the same smile he had seen in the corner of a baby bird’s mouth, right before its mother vomited sustenance into it, which he had been polite enough to wait out before taking the babies away for dissection. Thus, Daedalus’ mind slightly wandered as he imagined his wife, mouth agape and all excitement, waiting for vomit to be poured into her maw from above. The only thing that bothered him about the image was that it was David perched above her, slowly regurgitating all of the disgusting, half-digested things inside of him.

“Did you hear me, Daedalus? This is important advice that I’m telling you as a friend.” David wore a concerned look, because he was good at that.

Daedalus snapped out of his reverie. “Oh, yes, yes. Quite. Where are the children? Safe?”

Bathsheba’s gaze momentarily went blank. She hadn’t checked. David very cheerfully made the admission for her, he said, “Haven’t had the time to look into that one. Anyway, the gods have blessed us, that no one was harmed. And I suppose I could be on my way now.”

Prior to leaving, he hugged Bathsheba and gave Daedalus a reaffirming pat on the back, and then he meandered out into the night. David did not live anywhere nearby—the visit hadn’t been any kind of casual “Oh, I’ll check on the wellbeing of my neighbors, as it is hardly an inconvenience.” David had to walk a good three miles through sometimes treacherous terrain, all the more so for the lack of light to help safely circumvent its pitfalls. Then David had to face the same journey again, in reverse.

After watching the enemy disappear, Daedalus realized that his right hand had gone entirely white, turned into the hand of a cadaver, from clenching his ruler so tightly. The pure whiteness of his hand was disrupted by a vein of dark red that ran from where he’d drawn his own blood, from the pressure he had exerted against its sharp edges. He took a moment to look closely at his improvised weapon. The end that was stained with the blood of another, the offensive end, was still the model of exactitude. His own grip, the defensive end, had considerably warped.

Daedalus said, “I’ll go upstairs and see how the kids are doing.”

“Well, if you’ll do that, I’m going back to sleep,” his wife said, immediately becoming much more tired in appearance and demeanor. But still smiling. And not because of him.