True or False: Bears Like Surprises
by Kristen Leigh Schwarz
Jane is alive in the Heart Bar Campground, the first night of a weekend camping trip. She is here in her tent with—on top of—Nelson, whom she’s known for three days more than one month.
They met at a dog park, though neither of them owns a dog. Jane had come with her friend and her friend’s golden, Nelson had come with his sister and her husky. He had relocated to San Diego to complete Navy SWCC training but had been spending weekends in Los Angeles with his sister and her family. The dogs became friends, and then Jane and Nelson spent the next 48 hours together in her apartment. After that, he switched from spending weekends with his sister to spending them with Jane.
Last weekend, they were hiking the short but steep path through Fern Dell and up to the observatory when he got the call that he was being loaned to the Army, deployed to an Afghan combat zone as a weapons tech. Voluntold. They had already made plans to go camping.
So, here she is, and here he is, on their first trip together, and there is so much that she doesn’t know about him. But when he comes and passes out while she’s still on top of him, she knows him well enough to understand that—her head brushing the top of the tent, his mouth snoring open—he is lost to her. From the first hours of their meeting, dogless people surrounded by other people’s dogs and then suddenly alone in her apartment, they had entered a perfect storm of sex. It was the constant around which they’d accelerated all other intimacy, around which they’d built a shared reality.
She stares at moonlit nylon, nose threatening to run, shoulders caving toward the earth. Then she pulls on her shirt and performs an awkward dismount. She leaves the condom on him, shrugging to herself.
The world has gone limp too, all the sounds of daytime replaced by the feather-soft monotones of owls hooting to each other across the tall meadow grass. She claws on sweatpants, cold hardening her feet, and shoves her legs into her sleeping bag.
Then the owls clam up, and the world goes dead quiet.
*
Jane, living, sits inside the Heart Bar Campground bathroom the following morning, perched on the edge of the pit toilet, the mouth of the volcano—Mount Putridius—coughing down into the space between her knees. Her throat erupts with brine. Her cold, nascent when they hit the road yesterday, is now thickly mature. As she wipes her nose, she can feel the proximity of all the spiders on the ceiling above her, the eyes times eight.
She can also feel Nelson, though he can’t see her. He is just outside, reading all the signs tacked to the campground bulletin board. Their coupling is recent enough that she still has that double vision whenever he is around—her view from within and his view, theorized, of her from without. It is always strongest during sex: look good for him, perform well, but also feel good, let go, connect. It is vertiginous, the difference in visions, but also it is trancelike, drawing her far from herself in moments before plunging her back in.
“Who says true to this?” Nelson calls through the thin walls. “What kind of person?” She is learning that he is the kind of person to say things to her without context.
She stands and uses the toe of a shoe to drop the lid of the toilet with a clack. The wave of sulfur and ammonia follow her past the threshold into the blinding mountain day.
Nelson looks up at her from reading. More and more, since he received his ship date, he looks at her—at everyone and everything, at this bulletin board—imploringly. He points.
“Look at this.”
She walks over. A bunch of signs in larger fonts warn against fireworks and rattlesnakes. Tacked among them, the subject of his pointing, is a list of questions under the heading “The Bear Quiz—Test Your Knowledge.”
His recently buzz-cut head is velvety in the sunlight. She reaches a hand tentatively, touching the damp circle of shirt over his lower back, then leans in to read. It’s a true or false quiz, questions and answers separated by a drawing of a bear and her cub on a boulder.
“Question seven,” he says, rocking from foot to foot. A body always preparing to move.
She skips down. True or false: Bears like surprises.
“Who says ‘Yes, I think bears like surprises?’” he says.
“Oh, well…” She finds the answer. “I think it’s just there so they can tell you this part, to make noise when you hike. Shuffle your feet and talk loudly. It’s there for the answer.”
“But why ask the question at all when it’s such a dumb question?”
“I don’t—because then it doesn’t fit the format of a True or False quiz, I guess? Then it’s just one of these other signs telling you what to do. Watch for snakes, don’t shoot off fireworks, talk loudly when you hike.” Be observant, don’t be an asshole, but be a little bit of an asshole, enough to make yourself known. Hiking and dating advice. “This way you feel like you’re participating.”
“But no one is getting this wrong. It defeats the purpose of having it on a quiz.”
“You have some strong feelings on this bear quiz.”
“I just don’t like fake choices.” He shoves his hands in his pockets, then turns away toward the direction of their campsite. Her hand slides from his back. He stops, remembering, and offers her an elbow.
*
Jane, still alive, attempts to keep up with Nelson as they hike fast down the road outside the campground, past the horse camps, and through a break in the barbed wire fence. The camp host had described it to them from the dark recesses of her RV, a tiny dog sitting on a clipboard in her lap.
Already at ten a.m. it is 95 degrees, and the weight of the altitude has gathered into a fist in her sinuses. They scuttle over a dry riverbed, then back up the side of the San Gorgonio Mountain.
Nelson hikes like he is being chased. She grows familiar with the back of his head, the rolls of skin where his neck meets his skull, indistinct until his haircut three days ago. It’s a weird but beautiful topography.
Below them is the wide grass meadow that separates the mountain from the campground. Near the path, grayscale butterflies peel off the rough pine trunks and blue jays squawk from the branches. No bears or snakes, no need for announcing themselves. Jane is forced to look down at her feet to keep up, dodging stones and tamping down glittering shards of mountain mica into the trail dust.
“Pretty,” she says. Nelson glances over his shoulder and she points to the trail. “It’s like unicorn dirt,” she says.
For a moment, the double vision consolidates, and she sees only herself from his point of view. It is unflattering.
“True or false,” he says, turning back. “It only sparkles when you move.”
When she starts to fall behind, lungs aching, she calls out, “Can we take a water break?”
He fights his own momentum and comes to a stop, stepping off the trail and onto a large boulder overlooking the valley. She climbs up next to him and pulls out her water bottle. She takes a swig, then blows her nose. Far off is the low whoosh of cars on the highway, inescapable in Southern California.
“When I was little,” she says, fighting with the altitude to finish her sentence, “I would go out and wait for the school bus and I would hear that whoosh noise, and I didn’t know it was the five freeway. I thought it was wind. But I never felt the wind, right? So then I imagined somewhere nearby there was a windy canyon. But the wind noise was so constant, I imagined it must be trapped, you know, unable to move on. So then I pictured a canyon shaped like a donut, and I would picture going there someday and dropping a balloon or a plastic bag or something into the canyon and watching it race around on the wind in this big circle.” She turns away from him and coughs.
Nelson is silent for a long time, staring at the opposite mountain reining in the campground. She isn’t certain he’s heard her. She both wants and doesn’t want him to hear her.
Finally, without glancing over, he says, “Were you sad when you found out it was just the freeway and not a donut canyon?”
“I guess, a little. I don’t think I ever fully believed in it. It was just the image I could think of to describe what I heard. Did you—ever do that as a kid? Come up with elaborate explanations of things before you knew their real reasons? Like origin myths, or—”
“Hell, all the time. You still have to do it with people. Try to figure out why they act the way they act, what they’ll do next. Good for poker, and terrorists.”
“Do you have me figured out?”
“I don’t want to figure you out.” He shakes his head at the meadow.
“Ouch, dude.”
“No.” He reaches over and reels her in, holstering her against his right hip. “You know. It would be easier. You know.”
She sniffs, blows her nose, then tilts her head up at him. His intensity attracts her, but in some moments it seems to curdle without warning into impatience, and then she finds herself locked up, like this, staring into his eyes, unsure whether they are actually sharing the same reality, unsure how to proceed.
He kisses her forehead and herds her back to the trail.
*
Jane, tired but vital, eggs on the fire as night descends. The campground is full of RVs running generators, another incessant hum. Around them, the animal shifts are changing. The coyotes let out a round of yipping from the far side of the meadow, triggering a wave of crying in the campground’s baby population. Bats flap frantically above them like drowning swimmers. Everything feels restless and uncertain, as if it is the first nightfall on earth, as if this didn’t just happen last night.
Beside her, in a matching camp chair, Nelson bounces his knee and swigs bourbon from a canteen. Jane pokes at the logs with a stick. She lets the fire seduce her, the glowing embers shimmering like water pushed against glass, migrating waves of electric red current, a consuming motion.
“Hand me that.” He motions to her empty water bottle. He pours some of his bourbon into it and passes it back to her. “To your health.”
“To yours,” she says, feeling the words on the floor of her stomach.
“Thought we might see a rattlesnake or a bear out there today,” he says. “The signs got me all hyped.”
“Have you seen either before?”
“I saw a dead rattlesnake once. Otherwise they were all in a zoo.” He zips up his jacket. “What about you?”
She nods and takes a sip, letting the bourbon coat her throat. “One time, when I was six, I went to my neighbor Kelly Boorstin’s house to watch Beetlejuice. She was the same age as me and seriously the most accident-prone person I’ve ever known. Only person I ever knew who needed stitches from falling in the shower.”
“I almost did that once. Too much tequila.”
She smiles tightlipped into the fire. “She split her forehead open riding a Radio Flyer off the front porch one time. Handle flew back and just beaned her. I didn’t see it happen but it sounded epic. Anyway, I came over to watch Beetlejuice, which she swore was rated triple R. So I’m already completely terrified and the movie hasn’t even started yet, then ten minutes in, the car accident and the sandworms happen and I just flip out. Ah! This shit is too scary! And whenever I was at Kelly’s and I didn’t like something about my situation, I would just run home, like, no explanation. So I stand up. Ah! And run out the front door without saying anything to Kelly, and just as I’m about to take a step down off her porch, I look and there’s two baby rattlesnakes coiled up together in the sun on her porch step.”
“Hooo.”
“So I flip out again and run back into the house, take Kelly and show her the snakes, who are just relaxing in the sun, having a nice afternoon, preventing my exodus like the fucking sandworms in the movie, and the whole time the Beetlejuice soundtrack is just blaring in the background.”
“What did you do?”
“We went upstairs to Kelly’s step dad who was in bed sick—actually, now, when I think about it, he was probably hung over. My mom told me later he had a drinking problem. Anyway, he looked like hell, all pale, eyes swollen up.”
“Kind of like you now.”
“Thanks. So Kelly’s step dad climbs out of bed, comes downstairs, walks out on the porch, and doesn’t even hesitate, just picks the two baby rattlesnakes up in his bare hands, carries them across the street, and throws them into the field, just chucks them. Then he barrels past us without saying anything and goes straight back to bed.”
“And then you went home?”
“No. I stayed and we finished the movie.”
He chuckles and takes another pull.
She chuckles too, then squints into the fire. “I honestly haven’t thought of that day or of Kelly in forever, like not as an adult. She moved away a year after that. I—funny. The story was always that she was really clumsy.”
He frowns. “Sounds like she was.”
“Yeah,” she nods vaguely, “Yeah.” But when Kelly’s step dad walked past them, back to bed, she could feel Kelly tremble next to her.
“It’s—that’s what I want,” Nelson says with sudden intensity. “Boom, snakes gone. Right, you see the thing, the danger, you don’t hesitate. I wanted to be a DBG, I wanted to do Swick because sure, you might not be the SEAL, you might not get the fucking books written about you, but you’re tactical. You’re the getaway driver. Efficient at solving problems and getting people out of danger. I want to be able to make a difference so quickly, so seamlessly, it’s like I was never even there. Like I’ve rewritten history without anyone noticing. Like that.”
“Like a spy.”
“Like someone who knows what he’s fucking doing and should therefore get to do it. What I don’t want is to stand around teaching a bunch of bored, sunburned, big-eared kids how to load .50cals.”
She frowns, trying to stay with him, feet on the trail, glitter in her eyes. “But, like, I don’t think Kelly’s step dad really knew the danger of picking up the snakes. That’s a crazy thing to do. Sure, he got rid of them, but he could’ve just called somebody. He could’ve waited.”
“Maybe in the moment he felt the danger to you and Kelly outweighed the danger to him,” he shrugs. “Maybe it was the only way he could think of to help. You wait around to do the right thing and then maybe it’s too late to do anything.” He studies the back of his hand. “I hate waiting.”
“I don’t think he was thinking about us, not really. I don’t think he was thinking at all.”
“Well,” he meets her gaze, his eyelashes exquisitely thick, “I guess we’ll never really know.”
The stars are out over the meadow. Here, among the trees and the humming RV generators, the amazing living Jane doesn’t know the path forward, only that she needs to find it.
“I’m voting Democrat,” she sputters to him, “so they’ll bring you back. Recall you. Like bad tires.”
He smiles, and it’s the gentlest thing she’s ever seen, and it makes her happy but also a little angry. It’s a smile that confirms their realities no longer touch.
“It doesn’t matter who’s president,” he says. “A year is a year. I signed a contract when I enlisted. That’s the format. Anyways, the generals decide everything. They decide, they tell the president, and the president doesn’t know anything else, so he says OK.”
He looks into the fire pit and runs his hands over his scalp, back to front, one after the other, an assembly line of hands. The full moon makes his hands blue. The embers make his chin orange. She scoots her chair closer to his, tries to rest her head on his shoulder.
“Sorry I’m sick,” she says. “Bad timing.”
“I got inoculated against Anthrax on Monday,” he says. “I’ll probably make it.”
“Wow. Metal.”
“And I’ll be on imminent danger pay while I’m there. $250 extra a month.”
“To do what?”
“To put up with all the standing around, I guess.”
“$250 extra a month doesn’t seem like much to be in an active combat zone.”
He leans away to look at her. She can feel his eyes on her forehead. “It—yeah,” he says, clearing his throat. “Bad timing.”
*
Jane, full of life, wakes in the night in the tent to a gravel-crunching noise and thinks Nelson must be walking back from the bathroom, thinks she remembers him getting up to go.
But the noise continues for too long. But the noise is inside the tent.
She rolls over and there, next to her, taking up the rest of the close space, is a bear.
He has ripped through the side of the tent, she sees now. Moon and starlight fall through the rip, highlighting the dense brown fur on the bear’s shoulders. He pauses his chewing—the crunching—and snuffles. Slowly, he cants his head to meet her gaze. She stares back, her mind white.
“You have laryngitis,” the bear says. “In case you were wondering. You are also ovulating. I am certain you did not know that. Humans somehow never know. It is a wonder you procreate. You are also free of cancer, felicitations. I can smell these things.”
“Where is Nelson?” she whispers, the question overwhelming all others.
“I ate him, over in the field.”
“What?”
“He sacrificed himself. Normally I do not eat people, but he was insistent. Take me, not her. That is what he said. I came back for your cough drops.” The bear sighs and the tent floods with menthol. “They were what I wanted, originally.”
She watches the bear’s features dissolve as her eyes tear up.
“Monster—”
“No.” He juts his snout at her. “No. I am not a monster. I am a bear. I eat when I am hungry. It is a part of my bearness. So go call the Maker of Bears terrible.” He rolls on his side to face her. “Leave my reputation out of it.”
She coughs once, a sob escaping her throat.
“Does it help you to know that he would have died anyway?” The bear offers after a moment. “I could smell the doom.”
“You can—”
“Smell kinds of fear, yes, kinds of impulses. They tell you about the chances a person has.”
“I didn’t ask to be sacrificed for.”
“Of course you did not ask.” The bear grunts, his claws glinting in emphasis. “What kind of question would that be?”
She doesn’t say anything.
The bear rolls onto his back, his fur brushing against her side. She can’t resist pressing her hand into the wooly warmth, once.
“What—what did you do with his body?” she asks.
“The inedible parts I disposed of neatly in the trash bin on the other side of the bathroom.”
“That trash bin is supposed to be bear-proof.”
“Well, guess what.”
“It isn’t.”
“It is not.”
They sit together in silence. She wonders if she should scream, or run. She has no double vision here, no idea what a bear would see.
“Now that I have some distance, I regret eating him,” the bear admits. “It is not my way. He was just so insistent, so doomed-smelling. It did not seem like a choice.” The bear glances at her sidelong. “What will the rangers do?”
“Um,” she pulls up the bear quiz in her mind. “They will go looking for the bear that ate him. They’ll kill any bear they find in the area and cut open their stomachs until they find you. And then they’ll kill you, too.”
“Could they not just move me somewhere?” He fiddles his claws, tiny ears circling like paddles.
“There’s nowhere left for them to move you to,” she says.
“How do you know? How do you know that there is nowhere left to move me to? You guys have not destroyed all of the Angeles National Forest, yet.”
“That’s what the bear quiz said. No relocations. You’ll just come back.”
“The what?”
“The bear quiz.”
“There is a me quiz?”
“Yes. It’s on the bulletin board, by the bathroom.”
The bear is quiet.
“Do you want to see the quiz?”
“I mean, I am curious,” he says. “You would be curious too.”
“Well, let’s go,” she says. “Maybe you’ll learn something about yourself.”
*
No one else is out near the bulletin board. Jane, alive and trudging alongside a bear through the Heart Bar Campground, swings her flashlight around, hoping it might rouse someone, anyone, within their RVs. She isn’t sure who to call out to, what to say. She doesn’t know if she’s in her reality, or Nelson’s, or the bear’s.
The bear ambles ahead of her to the bulletin board, then eases up on his hind legs.
“Shine your flashlight over here, I cannot see.”
She glances to the left. The bathroom is fifteen feet away.
“Here.” She walks up next to the bear and hefts the chunky yellow flashlight onto his shoulder. “You hold it, that way you can direct the light.”
“This is awkward.”
“No, just, move your head—there.”
The bear tilts his head and pins the flashlight in place. He looks like a teenager on the family phone.
“True or false… this is, I think, a contrived format for conveying information. The barest illusion of volition.” He snuffles, mutters, “Barest. The bear-est. Bearist illusion.”
“But what do you think of the information?” she asks, inching backward.
“I think it is impossible to get to know someone in this manner. To co-exist in the moment, maybe, to not annihilate each other. But to build understanding: no. And why does this quiz treat my love for toothpaste as bizarre when you designed it to taste good?”
She turns and bolts for the bathroom, lungs seizing, feels in the next moment the bear’s movement behind her, closer with each step as the light of her released flashlight whips into the trees above her, the forceful hot steam of his breath catching her neck. She reaches the bathroom door, hooks the handle and swings the door wide, darting into the thick darkness as something—his body—hits the door hard, slamming it behind her.
As she turns the lock, another heavy hit and a roar shake the entire building.
She yelps and jumps back into the darkness, banging her leg against the rim of the toilet.
Uneasy silence.
She coughs, gasping for air. The silence stretches on into a minute as she works her lungs back into form, closes the toilet lid against the smell.
Finally, the bear’s voice trails in through the vent.
“I—I am sorry about that just now. My instinct kicked in when you ran. It is done, I promise. I am calm. I am in control. Are you okay?”
“No,” she says.
“I will stay here with you.”
“Don’t.”
“I can help. I can be helpful.”
She can’t feel—can’t bring herself to feel—Nelson’s presence in the bin outside. “He’s gone,” she says, sitting on the closed toilet. “He’s really gone.”
“He was barely here to begin with.” A pause, then she can make out, “Barely, bearly. I am bearly here.”
“You should go,” she says. “The rangers are going to come find you.”
“Your fear is survivor fear,” the bear says. “Not the doomed kind. I can smell it.”
She brushes the ghost of a spider web from her ankle. “You should go,” she says, weaker. “Why can’t you just walk away? Why are you all so eager to die?”
“Everything living dies. If you plan for it, at least you know when. No surprises.”
“That’s stupid,” she mutters.
“Survivor fear smells corrosive, like your battery acid. I think it is the guilt. Doomed fear just smells like the body, but more. Rot begun early. These are the facts that should go on the quiz, really.”
“You should hide,” she tries one last time. “They’ll kill you.”
“I think I will stay,” the bear says.
“But they’ll kill you.”
“I think I will stay.”
Kristen Leigh Schwarz grew up in Newhall, California and holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her stories have appeared in One Story, Santa Monica Review, American Literary Review, and St. Ann’s Review, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.