The Escape of Bruin Humphrey

By Gutbloom

For Made Up Words

“Astoria, Queens is no place for a werebear,” Dov’s mother had told him, but he was determined to live where he wanted to live and right now that meant the city. It was more of a struggle than he was willing to admit to anyone, even himself. He had been careful and, with a few close calls, he had managed to work things out pretty well.

This was a get-away weekend. He could feel the tightness of the changes in each of his limbs when he woke up on Friday morning. All was OK, he figured, though he had a lot to get done at the office before he left for upstate. Before he even stepped into the bathroom, his brain was skipping through the fragrance reports and e-mails he needed to write before he could leave. He checked his phone as soon as he was out of the shower, then sent a few texts while eating a bowl of cereal and listening to the news on the television. After dressing, he hurried downstairs to head for the train, but as soon as he stepped outside he realized he might be in trouble.

His legs felt strong and his phone suddenly didn’t interest him. He stood outside his building and felt the wind. He could hear an outbound train even though the station was three blocks away, and he knew just how far away it was. He knew where he was in a bear way, as if he could see the whole neighborhood from the sky and knew where the dot that was him was standing. It was difficult to explain. It was a sense.

By his calculations he had at least 48 hours until any kind of change was overpowering, and his calculations were seldom wrong. Still, he looked at the cloud-occluded sky and wished that he had been able to see the moon over the last week.

Once on the train his queasiness left him. The gentle rocking of the car eased some of his anxiety. He played a game of Madden football on his phone and became so engrossed in being Jay Cutler that he almost missed his stop.

The uneasiness returned when he entered his lab. He spent a lot of time in it, so he was keenly aware of the fragrances and their levels. He knew how the lab was supposed to smell before they started a docket. It was supposed to smell like a deer fawn, which is to say like nothing at all. The use of fragrances was precise and orderly, but this morning he could smell the Cyphre derivative they had been working on the day before, and he had to check to make sure that all of the citrus containers were properly closed. They weren’t doing any lab work today, just writing reports, so it bothered him that things were open. It turned out he was wrong. Nothing had been left open. He was smelling the residual scents from yesterday’s batches. He knew he shouldn’t be able to do that.

He sat at his desk and started to look up the current lunar phase when his boss, Marilyn, came in. She said, “Good morning,” and reminded him to give notes to John for the meeting he would miss. Dov almost didn’t hear what she said because he could smell that she was menstruating. It was as clear to him as if she had been wearing a pair of blood-stained pants. He could also smell her age, and her weight. When she left his office he could hear her walking away from his office for far too long.

“Holy shit,” he thought, “what the Hell is going on? This can’t possibly be. How could I have fucked up this badly?” He logged into his computer and looked at the moon phase. It looked right. Had he made a mistake on the perigee-syzygy calculation? He started to dig into an astronomical web site and took out his phone to start recalculating his numbers when it occurred to him that doing so wouldn’t make a difference. It didn’t matter. The mistake was already made. His body knew where the moon was. He had fucked up and had to leave the city immediately. He wrote an e-mail to Marilyn saying he was sick, packed up his laptop, and then left it in his office as he hurried down the hall to the elevator bank.

As much as he wanted to get right on the elevator, there was the problem of his bladder. He had to piss. He tried to resist the urge because he knew what pissing meant. His mind quickly locked onto the idea that it was better just to get it over with, so he broke for the men’s room with the hope that it was empty. It was. He rushed into a stall and pulled down his pants. For a brief second he marveled at the stiffness in his dick from the growing baculum, and then he began spraying a giant jet of urine onto the walls of the stall. An overwhelming feeling of righteous relief flushed through him, and before he knew it he had left the stall and was walking around the men’s room marking the walls, sinks, and trash can. As the last urine in his bladder splattered against the inside of the bathroom door, he let out a pulsing grunt that echoed against the tile walls. Unsure if the volume of the sound was due to his grunting too loudly or his improved hearing, he panicked, pulling up his pants and rushing out of the bathroom towards the elevators while still buckling his belt.

He stepped into the elevator, and when the door closed he was reassured by the confined space and relative quiet. The noise of the elevator was at least rhythmic. He took the time to calm himself.

He blew air, licked his face, and clicked his jaw several times, all of which slightly assuaged his anxiety. “Holy fucking shit,” he thought, “there is no way I can drive to the Catskills tonight. I’m going to have to stay in Astoria. Christ, what a fuckup! I should listen to music.”

There were several tools Dov had to postpone or offset his lycanthropy. Some members of his family were so practiced and strong that they could avoid transformation altogether, or at least for most of the year, if they wanted to. He had been taught techniques and practiced them his whole life. Most important among them was maintaining the “human mind”. One of the best ways to do that was by listening to music, so he set his earbuds to their lowest setting and pulled up his playlists. He considered listening to a book on tape, but that, he knew, was dangerous, for if his attention wandered too much he would just stop hearing it. He needed something that would pull him in, so he set his phone to electronica. When the elevator doors opened he felt much more in control. Then he remembered it was January.

“The bigger the moon, the deeper the bear state,” he thought to himself. “I might get sleepy on the way home.” While it was possible for him to resist the transformation of a weaker moon, Dov wasn’t skilled enough to hold off the strong tide he now felt. He could, on occasion, slide back and forth between the human and ursine, even taking on the form of a bear while keeping most of his human cognition intact, the state his family referred to as “Rose Red”, but he didn’t harbor any hope of that now. It was clear he was headed for at least one night of full bear, and once he slipped past a certain point there was no control at all. If, for example, the cold weather caused him to fall asleep on the train, he would go through the transformation. At some point somebody, perhaps an MTA worker at the end of the line, would realize that the thing in the corner was a black bear and he might be killed. If not, he would be captured, and then have to remain a bear until he was relocated or placed in a zoo. He had no such experience. There had never been a time where he had contact with humans while a bear, though he had heard plenty of stories, and he knew how to stay a bear. Remaining bear was easy. It just meant letting go. When he was a cub he had spent whole summers as a bear with his sister and mother.

Now, faced with a cold morning and an inevitable transformation, he considered his emergency backup plan. He would go to Prospect Park, find a deep thicket, spend the night outside, and hope that something woke him up in the morning. There were many dangers. The first being the trashcans. What was the chance that he could move through what the biologists call “Fall Transition” without at least a couple of hours of intense hyperphagia? More than likely, someone’s dog would find him rooting through the park trash after the sun had set, and then all hell could break lose. What if he killed someone’s dog? What if he killed someone’s child, or mauled an adult? What if he got treed and then tranquilized? He had heard lots of stories about the “tumble”. None of them were nice.

For what might have been a long while, he stood next to the revolving door watching throngs of people pass before the windows of the building. Time was becoming elastic. He already felt himself sliding into the flexible present. To make it home he had to plan, which meant concentrating on the future. He was reasonably sure he could make it back to Astoria. It occurred to him that he should call his mother. Calling his mother would be very un-bear-like. Adult males don’t call their mothers, so talking to his mother was a very human mind activity. He was thankful that he had thought of it.

He dialed the number and let it ring. The sow still used a land line. Anderson, the gamekeeper at the compound, picked up the phone.

“Hey, Anderson,” he said. “This is Dov, is my mother around?”

“No,” the old man replied. “She’s out in the woods.”

The news further confirmed his mistake. He blew into the phone and then asked, “When did she go out?”

“Oh, I imagine she left sometime last night around midnight.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Are you in trouble?” the old man asked.

“Maybe, is my sister around?”

“No, no,” the gamekeeper laughed a little, “she’s been in the woods for weeks.”

“Can you have them call me if either of them comes in.”

“I surely will,” said Anderson.

Dov hung up the phone. Prospect Park was out. It was a long way home. The electronica could only do so much, so he decided to visit Otto.

The wall of smells outside of the building caused him to stumble when he stepped out of the revolving door. There was dog shit, coffee, perfume, diesel fumes, trash, and a thousand other fetors in a miasma so thick and dense that he wanted to run back inside. The sounds of the street, now forced to pierce their way through his electronica soundtrack, were shrill and mechanical, and for that he was thankful, because the soundscape of the dead world slapped him back to the human mind like few other things could. He turned off the music and tightened his earbuds to dampen the sounds around him. There was nothing he could do about the smells.

He licked the air and wagged his head from side to side, then blew and started clicking his jaw. Nobody on the street noticed any of it. He walked quickly two blocks north, across the street and into the park.

While the sounds and sites of the stinking city kept the bear mind at bay, they also caused him intense anxiety. Every person was painful, and cars, trucks, and buses loomed like monstrous mechanical doom machines. Central Park offered some respite, though it too was crowded and introduced two dangers.

The first was the fear that he would react to a dog by pulsing, moaning, or charging. The dogs scared the shit out of him, and every one of them barked and strained on their leashes as soon as he was within sixty feet. He could smell their aggression, just like they could smell his fear. Fuckers. He hated them all. Some were worse than others. Hounds made him mental, their bay the very essence of fucked-up dog shit. He had once even seen a KBD in the park. When the dogs flexed, it took every bit of resolve not to run. He wanted desperately to climb a tree.

That was the other danger of the park. The temptation to break for a thicket or climb a tree to hide. Here he was forcing himself to walk on a macadam path full of people, dogs, trashcans, and vomit-scented benches while at any moment he could just break from it all, run across the lawns, swim the pond by Bethesda fountain, and spend the night in the Ramble. The Ramble cave was a good place for a bear.

He didn’t break. He stuck to the paths. The lack of snow on the ground was a blessing. The air was cold but the only effect of peri-hibernation he felt was hunger. He wanted to eat everything. If he started eating he wouldn’t be able to stop. Eating would make him sleepy, so he resisted the temptation to eat anything, though he could smell every roach coach at this end of the park. He smelled hot chestnuts, peanuts, falafel, and hot dogs but he tried not to think on them, he tried to keep a single-minded focus on walking to the zoo.

He was a member of the zoo, so he simply showed his card and slipped through the turnstile. He was such a regular that, despite his attempts not to engage anyone at the zoo, a worker had told him that the staff called him the “bear guy.” Through a series of circuitous paths he made his way as quickly as he could and in doing so confronted a new cavalcade of smells. Here too he knew how strong the scents ought to be, and yet each was a thousand times more powerful than they were on a normal day. He could count the seals that were upwind of him. He knew that they had been fed mackerel an hour and a half ago. The panda was out, the bison’s piss hadn’t frozen yet, the monkeys… the dirty fucking monkeys were all shitting peanuts on their stupid rock apartment installation… and then he stopped, for he could smell Gus’ lunch.

They had given Gus salmon. So potent was the smell that now filled his head that Dov again staggered. He blew once, twice, then three times. Gus, the murderous polar bear, was certain to be swimming laps in his tank and, as always, Dov was sure that Gus could sense him. He didn’t care. He walked quickly past the enclosure, past the water and glass where crazy fucking Gus spent every day obsessively swimming back and forth, and he tried not to look at the big white snow bear, but as he passed he felt the pang that he had come for. Even Gus provoked the anguish that he knew a visit to Otto would muster much more acutely. He pressed on until he stood in front of the black bear’s “habitat”.

He took up his usual spot. The scent of Otto’s urine was everywhere. Dov could smell that the bear had spent the morning on top of the rock and was now tucked behind the tree trunk, sleeping. Just the fact that Otto didn’t hibernate wrenched Dov back toward humanity. Empathy flooded through him like a clean drink of water. It started in his chest and moved up to his head. Things cleared. He felt more human.

The big male stirred. Otto didn’t know him, but he was certain that Otto sensed him. The bear emerged from behind the trunk, sniffed the air, and then walked toward the moat. Otto came to the edge of the chasm as he often did, extended his neck, and made a pulsing threat while looking right at Dov. Dov responded with a subordinate moan. He had no intention of upsetting Otto. He looked around at the cage, smelled the pellet food, and imagined what living on a slab of concrete was like. Then came the flush of horror, empathy, and anger through his head, belly, and heart. He could do nothing but look at the poor old boar and moan quietly.

The visit had done what he had hoped. Awake and less anxious, Dov made his way to the N train. Smells still assaulted him, but he was happy to discover that the train wasn’t crowded. He tried to think about the people around him. He could tell everyone’s age and what they had eaten that day. He could smell their dogs, cats, and… ferrets? The young man sitting across from him was incontinent, he was sure of it. He could smell each person, hear the music they were listening to while looking at their phones. He kept clicking his teeth and jaw, and nobody seemed to notice. His thoughts turned to food.

He descended the elevated train steps and bought four tamales from a woman selling them for a buck a piece out of a 5 gallon bucket at the base of the stairs. He ate them immediately, not bothering to unwrap the corn husk containers. They were grapes to his blossoming hunger.

The smells of the fish store led him to it, and here he enjoyed the specificity and power of his olfaction. He caught the scent of cod, and followed it back and forth across the sidewalk, tracking the swirling air that made it dance, and he enjoyed the rising intensity until he picked up the smell of the salmon. Salmon! He followed it. He could smell the red, red salmon… and knew it was a whole fish. He could see it in his mind’s eye, judge the distance to the store, see his progress as he walked along the street. The people and machines fell from his thinking, and before he knew it he was standing in front of an ice filled case staring at the very fish he had been tracking for two blocks. He bought four large salmon, $230 worth. The fishmonger wrapped them up and put them in a large paper bag. He carried the bag as if it were an infant.

He intended to go directly back to his apartment, but the smells of the donut shop came into view. Before he knew it he was there. One, two, three, and then finally four dozen donuts, of all varieties, leaching sugary goodness in deep boxes packed in a large plastic bag that he now held with one finger of a hand cradling the fish package baby. Thus contorted, he made his way back to his own building. His facial hair was now thick, his eyes had began to squint, his tongue lolled and wagged, and a new waddle emerged from his shortening legs. The weight of his body was all in his ass now, and he wanted to bend over and go down on all fours, but he had to make it back to the apartment.

He took the stairs so that he wouldn’t have to wait. Bursting through the door of the apartment, he carried the packages directly into the bathroom. He turned the cold water faucet in the tub on full blast, and stripped off his clothes. His hirsute nudity revealed a plump body covered in a fine black fur. He ran around the apartment opening windows, struggling against the rapidly deteriorating usefulness of his thumbs. Once the windows were open and the cold January air was blowing through both his bedroom and living room, he ripped open the bag of fish and dumped all four in the bathtub.

Then he ate. He plunged his face into the bathtub and bit down on one of the salmon. As his repeated dunkings into the cold water resulted in mouthfuls of sweet fleshy salmon, the thoughts of job, apartments, and internet connectivity faded to dust at the nether regions of his thinking. There was just the water, the salmon, and the smell of donuts. Time shifted. He lost the sense. There was just salmon, and then donuts. He ate them in the living room, a giant hulking black mass unpacking them from their boxes with his foreclaw. Bending down to lick at them with his beautifully long tongue, his amiable grunts filling the living room.

With a full belly, and the warmth of his full coat of shiny black fur, Dov felt the familiar heaviness of his eyelids. He ambled lazily into his bedroom closet carefree and content. There he fell into a deep sleep on a nest of dirty laundry.

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