The white bear is still there when I leave the store. I lift my hand like I’m going to throw my bottle at it, but it doesn’t move, and of course I wouldn’t actually throw a bottle. Not a full one.
I turn and start walking, gravel crunching under my feet. I hear a huff of breath and more gravel behind me as the bear stands and follows.
#
I remember…
Goochie handed me a sheet of blank white paper and grinned like a lunatic. It was third period, and we were about to change classes again. That was new that year, so we were all still a little weirded out by it.
“What’s this?” he asked me.
“A piece of paper.”
“No, it’s a drawing,” he insisted.
I squinted at the page, but I couldn’t see anything and said so.
“It’s a polar bear in a blizzard!” Goochie collapsed in a fit of giggles, and Ms. Torberry glared at us from way up at the front of the classroom but didn’t say anything.
“What about its eyes?” I asked.
Goochie frowned at me. “Maybe it closed them.”
“That’d be cool,” I said.
“What?”
“Closing your eyes and just melting away. Disappearing.”
“No, dummy, there’s still a bear there. There’s always a bear there. You can’t just make a polar bear disappear.”
“What about global warming?” That was another new word, that and acid rain. They said it came up our way from stateside.
“Nah, they’ll be fine,” Goochie said. “Polar bears can swim for days.”
“That’d be cool, too.”
There weren’t any roads out of town. I mean, there were, but they didn’t have names until you hit Route 33. It was a lot like floating around on an iceberg, I always thought. It would be nice to be able to swim for it.
#
The door to my house isn’t locked. I used to keep it secure, but it’s made of the same paper-thin crap wood veneer as everything else, and I couldn’t afford to fix it after some crackhead punched a hole in it to unlock it from the outside. Not that they got much for their troubles, but they did leave a pile of vomit for me to clean up. You don’t really need the door; I could walk through the walls with a little effort. It doesn’t make me feel strong or powerful, though. Just clumsy. Swollen. Grr, argh, you won’t like me when I’m angry.
I’m always angry.
The bear isn’t visible when I turn around, but I remember. I remember what Goochie said. The bear is always there.
The newspaper called it the Ghost Bear, because people are bad at naming things. I was angry about that, too, if you can believe it. Angry that it wasn’t just me, that I wasn’t crazy after all. I’d wanted it to be something private.
#
I remember when Goochie left town in his cousin’s borrowed truck. He had the dreams, and the initiative, all the good and hopeful things. That was all you needed, right?
The first Arctic explorers killed polar bears, of course, and tried to eat them. It didn’t work out well. Polar bears live in the middle of nothing that every now and then turns into a feast of ridiculous proportions, so they have to store things up and wait it out. Turns out polar bears are so good at storing nutrients that their livers contain a dose of vitamin A lethal to humans. Too much of a good thing.
I’d laughed when Goochie told me about that last year. I said that if my liver wasn’t already toxic just to give me a few more years, and he’d gotten all mad and sullen like he did sometimes. I’d laughed when he told me about his plans for making it big in the restaurant business, too. I feel bad about that now. But how was I supposed to know? He was always full of energy, talking a mile a minute about his ideas and how great everything was going to be. He seemed like the last person who’d need a little encouragement.
Goochie came back to town eventually, but he wasn’t driving the truck when he did. He was in the back, in a box.
Too much of a good thing.
#
I’m most of the way through the bottle I brought home when there’s a thump and the whole house shudders and tilts. I stagger upright, hearing the groan of nails flexing in wood, bits of particle board showering down around me like snow. I go to the window but I can’t open it because the frame is all bent.
The bear is leaning against the house, scratching its back like my home is just a scrub pine tree.
“You son of a bitch,” I shout, yanking on the window. It doesn’t move. I throw my bottle anyway and it smashes against the wall, leaving a dent and a small hole in the thin sheetrock. The bear pushes again and the house tilts like it’s a trailer and about to tilt over. I go to the door. The inside knob breaks off in my hands, but I can reach through and tug it open. The screen door hasn’t had a screen in years, so I just step right through.
The bear smells like blood and sweat, wet fur, heavy animal tang and predator stink. It turns to face me and its eyes are holes, the night piercing through the white fur from behind. I remember Goochie told me polar bears’ fur isn’t white, but transparent and hollow, so that sun travels down it like fiber optic cable and they get the most warmth they can from it.
“You’re not even real,” I tell it, and I’m crying and I can’t tell if I’m sad or angry. “You’re dead. It says in the paper you don’t exist, you’re a ghost bear. A local legend.”
The bear leaves my house and I hear a crack and whoosh as it settles back. The air from inside smells like vodka and mildew, but that’s overwhelmed by the musk of rotten fish as the bear comes toward me. Bears should look funny, with their fat rippling like waves and the slow rolling shoulders, trundling along like there’s always a tuba band playing behind them. They aren’t, though.
“It’s not even snowing,” I say, and even there I’m wrong. It’s sleeting down all the time even if I can’t feel it. We had a chance to gather resources, but we missed it. The summer was over a long time ago. Now it’s just the wind and the ice, and even that they’re taking away from us.
The bear opens its mouth and it’s another hole, more of the night spilling out, pushing through. Maybe that’s the other way a bear can vanish, the dark inside welling up like blood in a cut. It’s always there, even if you’re blind to it.
I close my eyes and shiver, and I wait to disappear.