Before she saw the animal, their mother didn’t know there was anything notable about the bear. She caught her breath and squeezed Mike’s shoulder when she saw it. All the fur on both sides of its muzzle was gone, leaving only skin the color of the dark blood beneath it. The three of them watched as the bear walked toward them into the bars of the cage without turning its head until its nose was wedged between the black steel. With deliberate strength the bear planted its haunches and, stiffening its shoulders and neck, began to scrape its muzzle up and down between the bars. The bear’s eyes were open the whole time, grinding down its face.

Mike remembered well that after a couple rounds of this his Mother looked down at her boys and said, “They should kill that bear.”

When they got home, their father had made elaborate sandwiches for lunch. Not long after, their mother read that the bear had lacerated the face of a third zoo keeper and was to be put down. She cut out the clipping and put it on the refrigerator door.

38

Mike is a little off. He can feel it, in his head, behind his eyes. It has just stopped raining—the air feels like breath—and Burton is leading them to a bar called Triple Happiness. Silvery reflections of street lamps steam off the street. Pay attention to the weather, Mike thinks, as he walks between Bridget and Burton. This is what his father always said. Weather makes you smarter, weather doesn’t lie, weather is real. Just behind them, Tweety is with Paul, who recounts the adventure. “Isn’t life grand?” he says after each twist in the story. Tweety is an obsequious audience, laughing, feigning fear and shock. Mike hardly listens. He thinks he sees a girl on a motorcycle, flying up the street, almost off the ground. It spooks him.

“Did you see that?” he asks Bridget. She didn’t.

“You must have got hit hard,” she jokes.

“Yeah,” he says, “maybe.” He thinks it may or may not be his own growing hallucination. He doesn’t give it much thought.

Yes he does.

39

Inside Triple Happiness, Mike and Tweety sit across a table from each other. They haven’t spoken since they left the sex bar. She is especially pretty in the darkness of the bar, all shadows and black hair. From the way she looks at him Mike thinks he is supposed to speak first, but he remains silent.

“Maybe you are like Christopher Dorr,” she says.

Mike doesn’t know whether she says this because she knows it will get his attention or because it is true or maybe both. Somehow this is the worst thing she could say to him. Maybe it’s just the way she said it. She is fucking with him. He knows this for sure.