Chapter Text
“As much fun as a zoo can be,
Life on the other side of the bars is a different story.
Is it possible to stay sane when you’re locked behind bars all day so an endless parade of people can stare at you?
In the case of the Discount Zoo bear population…
…It may already be too late.”
- Bear Nuts, pp. 2-3.
There was nothing outside of this hotel room.
Crack tried to think back, but all that was there were minute flashes of documents and emails and trucks and timesheets and patios and office hallways and conference rooms with nothing to tie them together. Faces and voices that were once familiar and even the passage of time itself became nothing but a mixed-up smear, fading further and further the more Crack provoked it. No conference. No job. No self-righteous, overcompassionate bosses, nosy packers or gossipy pickers. All wiped away like dust motes between the fibres of the fabric of time.
Even the room before them looked like a mystery. It was normal in every sense of the word: Four walls, a carpet, a bed, a wardrobe, the aggressive scent of Yankee Candles over detergent. He found the chemical odour reassuring. He didn’t know why. Crack was aware that he had chosen to hide in this room, and yet, it felt as if he had woken up there on what may as well be the first day of his life.
His eyes darted about the room. He scrutinised each corner over and over, and each time, nothing changed. He didn’t know what he was expecting. To him, this was the most telling sign of all that he had to keep looking.
All he had to do was open the door. Then, he’d find an ordinary hallway in an ordinary hotel. What else would there be? Yet, he found himself unable to move from his position next to Evil.
Crack knew that he was a bear, and his name was Crack. The bear in front of him was named Evil, and Evil was his best friend. Those were the only things he was certain of.
Evil, like him, was exhausted, and his grey fur was damp with sweat. Crack did not stop focusing on Evil. It was the only way to keep the world from spinning, and the only way to keep his head from exploding. Evil looked like he had aged one thousand years. He looked exactly the same as he had always known him. When Crack looked at him, he knew that he was home.
“…You think I should open that door?” Asked Evil, breaking their silence. He looked like he wanted it exactly as much as Crack did. Thank the Mother.
“Yes. I think you should.” Crack replied.
“Alright,” Evil stood up, limbs frail and joints stiff, “Let’s get on with it.” Evil pushed down on the handle and tossed open the door. What they saw was nothing more than a bland, empty hallway, likely joined to more just like it. The spinning slowed to a halt.
Evil closed the door. Step one, complete.
Crack was a bear. He had always been a bear.
Tension continued to mount within Crack as memories of his old life returned. There was nothing he could do but wait, without even moving, certain that a single provocation would tear it all apart. He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling above him; featureless, static and consistent.
Crack was a bear. He had always been a bear. He lived in a zoo with eleven other bears in Discount, Ontario. They were his friends and his family, and even though things got tough and they didn’t always get along, they always worked out in the end.
So then, why was he here and not there?
Crack heard the scuffling of the carpet as Evil began to fidget, curling his toes between the carpet fibres and pulling on the long tuft of fur between his horns. It was simultaneously reassuring and horrifying that he was having just as bad a time as he was. The only thing Crack could think to do was look away, knowing that staring would only make things worse.
And so, he looked down at his navel.
Crack was a bear. He had always been a bear. But before that, he was a cub.
Crack’s heart pumped fast, tension gripping his body as if an invisible force was pinning it down. The memories that came did not gradually trickle in like before, like the grains of sand in an hourglass. These memories came in short, piercingly bright flares, giving Crack seconds at a time of terrible clarity. Memories of the dead wood under his feet as he followed his brothers across the deep river into the farthest parts of the forest. Memories of skinny branches striking his face as they raced each other up the tallest trees. Memories of Mom bringing home an enormous deer for them to eat, leaving them thankful that they got to play instead of having to hunt like she did.
Crack’s brothers were bears. They had always been bears.
It was disgusting how stupid he had been. How careless. They all were. Stupid enough to think that they could take every risk in the world and come home each time unscathed and smiling, as if the universe favoured them enough to spare them from its natural processes. The Mother had always made Her rules clear. His brothers paid the price for being selfish enough to play where the alligators dwelt. But, Crack was the most careless of them all, for continuing to flout Her rules by reaping the benefits of living. It was only after Mom never returned home that a worthy punishment finally arrived.
Crack’s mother was a bear. She had always been a bear.
Crack remembered the day he arrived at the zoo. The clinic was filled with lights that stars couldn’t produce and sounds that the forest never made. The bedding under him, however soft, was also strange and foreign, as if it knew his body was never supposed to touch it. These things were not meant to exist. They were unholy. Whichever way he looked, everything was bigger, louder and brighter than it was supposed to be.
Everything only stayed that way in the years that followed. His memories became filled with refusing food that everyone else could eat just fine, trying and only marginally succeeding at falling asleep at night, trying his hardest not to explode into panic at any provocation, implicating the other bears in paranoid wild goose chases, screaming, fainting, vomiting, and trying much too hard to keep his heart slow and his legs steady. His life then had been an endless succession of running, hiding, and being generally useless.
Then, mercifully, the memories stopped, and he was next to Evil in a small, blue pickup truck.
And after that, he was here.
How the hell did someone like me end up here?
Was it even him at all? Crack found it difficult to believe. Sure, he was terrified, but wouldn’t anyone else be in this situation? No matter how many angles he tried to look at it from and how many contrived excuses he heaped on, there was no way he could picture the same person who wore knee pads and a helmet to play volleyball sharing a hotel room in parts unknown with the most fearsome creature in the Discount Zoo.
He could feel the phantom sensation of January wind rushing through his fur.
Crack was a bear. He had always been a bear. A bear who was beginning to question how much time he’d spent awake because visions of syringes danced in his eyeball goo like dolphins at his own personal SeaWorld.
Crack was unable to keep still, his arms and legs in a scramble, his instincts at war and locked in a stalemate. He felt like he was about to choke on his own heart as it threatened to leap through his throat. The only thing that kept him from passing out in that precise second was Evil, who had splashed him with water from the en-suite bathroom.
Evil was a bear. He had always been a bear.
“Evil… if that was toilet water… I swear I’ll bite you,” Crack tried to utter with the feeble control he had over his voice.
When he looked up at Evil, Crack saw that his face was also wet. It looked like sweat at first glance, but it couldn’t be, because his face was damp and dripping, the water pressing his fur flat. His lack of a smile told Crack that this was no act of mischief. Maybe he understood the gravity of the situation. Or maybe, it would be a while still before his memories of his old self returned.
Though Evil held the honour of being the first on his feet, his limbs juddered, and Crack was almost sure he could see his chest rise and fall. Evil tensed his brow, clinging to the last vestiges of seriousness.
“Did that just happen to you, too?” Evil roared.
Crack could only nod as he tried to suppress the urge to scream.
“How much do you remember?”
Crack wrenched his eyes shut. Anything to avoid the sight of his navel. “W… W… We lived in a zoo! You were there, and so were Prozac and Gay and Lech and all the rest! They were our family! We had a family!”
Crack kept his eyes shut, but he could feel the stillness in the air.
“Is there anything else? I mean, stuff you probably didn’t remember before?”
Crack’s breath became shorter, and his eyes clamped down far enough to turn his whole face inward. “I… I was a cub! I mean, I remember being a cub! And I… the… No, what happened was… I did…”
Crack began to stumble over his words, certain that his jaw itself was refusing him. Crack quickly learned that he didn’t have to say anything, for between his stammerings, he could hear the deathly silence that filled the room.
“You don’t need to say anything!” Evil barked, sputtering in a way that left Crack certain he was going to explode, “I just need you to know that none of that was your fault! You hear me? None! I know that I’m the last person to start talking about innocence, but I’m the only one left, so listen to me when I say that you didn’t kill your brothers, and you didn’t kill your mom!”
Crack stopped quivering and sat still and limp, like a rag doll that had been thrown against the wall. He had no choice now but to open his eyes and face Evil again.
“How do you know?!?” He blurted, not a scream, but loud in a different sense.
It was now Evil’s turn to hesitate, for his jaw to stiffen up in disobedience. What he said was impulsive, but it was no mistake. He could no longer drag this out.
“What’s the last thing you remember before you left the zoo?”
“I remember that there were geese coming, and I was freaking out and everyone was fed up with it.”
“Do you know what happened after that?”
Crack waited for a brief moment. “No, not at all. Is that bad?”
Evil did not wait. He was past the point of hesitation.
“Right after the geese came and we thought we had you calmed down, you caught a goose and ate it, in the garden, in front of all the humans. Everyone was pretty sure you ate that thing alive. There was blood everywhere, and all the humans were watching, and you didn’t even care. It was like you were in some kind of trance. I mean, it had to be. The moment Pro woke you up, you started puking up goose feathers and passed out flat on your face. And me?” Evil sighed, “I was just giddy to tell Prozac it wasn’t my fuck-up this time.”
“So while you’re out cold in the bathtub, everyone’s wondering what to do about all this, and so Death gets the bright idea to take you to the aviary to see that crank, The Owl. Everyone’s all gung-ho about this because he helped them with kiddie shit like meditating and smelly candles, and so off we all go to see him. You’re still unconscious while this is going on, mind you. He does that weird shit he does with his plants and stuff, and next thing you know, we’re inside your head.”
“INSIDE MY—” Crack interrupted, before being swiftly cut off by Evil’s paw wrapped around his muzzle. Crack drove his claws into them, but he wasn’t interested in fighting back. Instead, he panted and panted, drawing in all the air he could get. Evil couldn’t help noticing he was looking greener than usual. His claws ripped up the hotel carpet as he anchored himself to the ground, desperate to keep from shaking or fainting or flying about the hotel room like a mid-inflation balloon. In response, Evil silently rose, fetched an empty bucket from the en-suite bathroom, and placed it in front of Crack.
“Don’t you act all coy about this,” Even though Crack had found his voice, it sounded as if he had ran halfway across the world, “I only just found out about these people who I’m supposed to have loved and they’re supposed to have loved me, and then you tell me that they chose to violate the sanctity of MY MIND, and for WHAT? How the fuck do you WANT me to feel about this? And you, Evil, you were there too! Don’t convince me that you’re above it all, because you’re not!”
Evil didn’t care. He was past the point of needing to save face. “I’m sorry. It’s going to get worse, but you’ll know why I had to tell you.”
“So in your head, The Owl does this ritual that’s a whole bunch of esoteric nonsense, but what’s important is that we all saw your cubhood. We saw all the awful things that happened to cause all this. The alligators… all of it. Prozac, Death, me, The Owl, you—we all saw it. I think you were supposed to ‘make peace’ with those memories or something and give them to another you that lives in your head? Not that any of it made any fucking sense.
“And then, after it was over, you seemed really happy. We all got up the next day and there you were, making blueberry pancakes, with raw eggs and the stove and everything. Everyone was really shocked. But not so shocked that they didn’t eat them. You were acting so… helpful and chipper. Cara and Sara were into it! Like, in a horny way! It was super creepy, and I seriously don’t get how it wasn’t creepy to everyone else. They just caught a glimpse of the world they wanted to live in and dove headlong into there without a parachute. I could see it on Prozac’s smarmy little face. Like, repression is the guy’s middle name, but this was a new level.”
“It turns out that you drugged up the pancakes. Everyone was out cold in what used to be your inner sanctum, except for Prozac, Death and me.”
Evil hesitated. Crack came close to swallowing his arms whole.
“We were the ones you wanted to make watch as you picked off everyone else. Including The Owl. When I went looking for him, he had already been scooped and eaten. You knew that we all fucked you up, and you wanted revenge. If I hadn’t dream-herb’d everyone back into the mindscape, it would have been a complete bloodbath.”
The room began to spin, and Crack felt as if he was falling. It felt like his skin wanted to melt off of him, repulsed by the filth. He got onto all fours as he tried even harder to fix himself in place with his claws. His head hovered over the bucket, both bears certain that he was going to vomit. But instead, he sobbed.
This could easily have been another Evil trick. It would be just like Evil to infest his head with happy thoughts of family and home, only to pull it all out from under him. Wouldn’t Evil have found that so funny? The look on his stupid face after he told him that he killed every family he ever had? Crack would have been so certain of yet another paranoid theory, if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d had those memories even before Evil could step in. If it wasn’t for the smell of their fur. The cadences in their voices. The taste of rotting fish heads. The jeering laughter of human children. The sensation of the dressings on his right arm after his battery acid accident. Reassuring himself that it was only the others watching late-night reruns on the TV when he heard odd sounds from his room at night. Wincing at the sound of someone shouting, only to find that it was Gay and Lech arguing over an empty jar of peanut butter in the cupboard. And if it wasn’t for the fact that Evil was not laughing at another prank well played. In fact, Evil’s face had taken on a subduedness that Crack had never seen. For once, Crack wished for the Evil who took joy in his suffering, because then, he would not have to think about the implications of a truly remorseful Evil. Because then, he might stand a chance at denying all this was happening.
“If you’re telling the truth about all this, Evil, because if not, then… then…”
Crack vomited into the bucket. Crack’s recent adventures—wherever they were—left him better-fed than the Crack in Evil’s memories, yet he was still perturbed at how much billowed out of him. The intensity had made him woozy. He wasn’t quite on the brink of fainting, but he was no longer panicking.
When Crack finally looked up, Evil was there to meet his gaze. His brows were level and his eyes were sharp. Crack’s body tensed, but only slightly, as if it knew something he didn’t.
“Crack, I’m going to tell you now the same thing I told you up in the mindscape.” Evil’s voice was as gentle as his nature allowed, but his face remained serious. “That. Was. Not. You. You don’t do those things. It was The Owl, and his fucked up voodoo magic. It was everyone else, for fucking around with your head in the first place and pretending nothing could possibly go wrong. They’re all the ones who fucked you over. Don’t let them off the hook by taking the blame for this, because you do not deserve to have that. You need to understand that.”
Crack would have been reassured, if he didn’t remember who he was dealing with.
“That’s easy for you to say, Evil!” Crack barked, “You’ll twist anything to make it seem like it wasn’t your fault! You do it all the time, and it was as transparent then as it is now! Since when did you ever give a shit about morality? And don't forget your part in all this, Evil, so if it turns out that I was innocent all along, then—how convenient!—You were innocent too! Why else would you even care?”
Evil always found himself forgetting how audacious Crack could get sometimes. “You want to know how I know that, Crack? Immediately after all this went down and everyone got the puke washed off of them, Prozac’s next move was to give a half-assed apology and have everyone pretend that none of this ever happened. According to them, you’ve done something hideously unforgivable. What, exactly? You’ll never know. Because peace means lying to your face and acting like they don’t know what you’re talking about when you see them acting strange, all the while getting to wash their paws of everything. The best possible solution! That is, unless you prefer to see things for what they are.
“So I organised a secret meeting between us—I called us The Shunnery, for obvious reasons—to plot our revenge. I wanted to strike hard, to completely shatter the idea of what they called ‘family,’ and for me, there was no better time to do this than on Christmas, which was just around the corner. You, however, were more merciful. How could you not be? You didn’t want to hurt them any more than ‘you’ already had. You just wanted your family back. You were talking about decorating the tree and eating gingerbread men and all kinds of Christmas stuff you couldn’t do before, so sure that you could win their favour now that you didn’t have as much of that annoying mental illness getting in their way. And so we decided to call a truce: if they treat us right over the Christmas season, all will be well. If not, then we make them pay.”
Crack reflected on this. It all sounded like something he’d do. Even though he knew he’d lived through all those memories, there were times when he struggled to recognise the bear he used to be. Suddenly, he felt an excitement to decorate a Christmas tree that was long gone. He could smell the pine and gingerbread baking, and hear the bears’ hubbub as they busied themselves decorating. This excitement was brief. Crack still had questions he needed answered. Things couldn’t have gone so right, because otherwise they’d still be at the zoo. He couldn’t bring himself to understand what kind of madcap revenge plot would find them in a faraway hotel room with no memory of how they got there.
“What happened after that?” Crack asked.
At that, Evil’s muzzle wrinkled, and his brow rose. However, this was not from any sort of relief.
“Christmas went on. Decorations went up, and gingerbread was made. Everything was… fine… to a point. Pro decides to bring us all Christmas oranges, and we eat them. Everybody’s happy. Then, as it turns out, the oranges were tainted. Prozac somehow managed to fill a load of oranges with Death Touch to knock us all out cold, and why? Just so he could have some peace and quiet. Death told me all about it. So much for putting it all behind us when he was entirely willing to drug you all over again. When everyone eventually came to on Boxing Day, Prozac’s modus operandi was—you guessed it—pretend none of it ever happened. Suffice to say, I had a lot of ideas on how to get revenge, but of course I couldn’t go ahead with any of them without a majority vote from the Shunnery. That’s because you were becoming pretty hard to get alone. At first, I thought you were being dumb enough to hold out for a happy New Year. But then I remembered what you said to me at our inaugural meeting. That those guys were the only ones who would put up with my… our shit and still call themselves our friends. Without that, where would you go? I don’t need to remind you how high-maintenance you are.
“Then one night, after New Year’s—whoosh. You’re gone. You definitely weren’t just hiding somewhere in the cave or in that Inner Sanctum of yours. I could smell it. Of course, I found you soon enough, climbing into that little truck in the car park. Maybe you wanted me to spot you. Maybe you didn’t. But, something tells me you picked the one night a month I scare the otters for a reason. And, I’m sure, as you can probably pick up on, I followed you. I was certain you’d find me hiding there before the truck moved off, but you didn’t care to look. You were just in this weird trance. Maybe that’s not the right way to put it. It was like… every single part of your body was in total agreement and knew exactly what they were about to do. And me? I knew I had to go in there, but I barely knew why. I was the scared one for once. Because the truth is, even though it looked like you were just running away again, what you did was the bravest thing anyone in that cave could’ve done. Including me.”
Crack vaguely remembered Evil saying something similar, a long, long time ago. He wasn’t sure how much he believed it at the time, even if it did make him feel better. But, Crack’s memories of the Discount Zoo were filled with Evil blatantly lying. He was always so obvious. Why wouldn’t he lie? If it wasn’t the ‘real Crack committing these murders, then his part in hauling him off to The Owl would be consequence-free. How lucky. So, he could only be lying again to wash his paws of this clear disaster of an adventure. Of course, Evil would be so brazen.
“How could you possibly call that the bravest thing you could do? You’ve always been too damn confident for your own good, but this really takes it! You get to keep saying stuff you don’t mean all the time, because you think life is just one big practical joke where you’re king of the world and everyone else is just a sucker the Mother created for you to laugh at! But that’s not true at all! Actions have consequences! Really bad, dangerous ones that get everyone hurt! Because if you keep saying stuff like that, Evil, someone might just start believing it! And then where would we end up?”
Hearing this wasn’t news to Evil anymore, not even when it came from Crack’s mouth. He wasn’t going to agonise over it. He knew exactly what he was going to say.
“There was something you said to me during that big rampage. After The Owl got to you. I don’t know if you meant it, but I remembered it. You said, ‘You’re just jealous I can do the psycho asshole thing better than you.’ Well. You were half right.”
Crack was silent. His breathing became less desperate, but his grip on the hotel room floor only tightened.
“I was jealous. Sometimes, I still am. But not about the ‘psycho asshole’ thing. What I saw in the mindscape really made me think. I mean, I could already tell something fucked up must have happened to you to make you end up the way you were, but seeing it for myself changed things. Or maybe it made something that was already there louder? I don’t know. Either way, it made me understand a lot about who you were, but also a lot about who I am. You… you’re decent.”
“Decent?!?” This, Crack was ready to believe.
“Yes. You’re just a decent person. You’re not some Boy Scout like Prozac pretends he is, but you’re not a total asshole either. Only decent. The way any person should be. Normal, insofar as I can use a word like ‘normal’ to describe you. And that’s how I knew all along that the Crack that went on a murderous rampage wasn’t the real you. Because that Crack was behaving just like me.
“The point I’m trying to make is that we were both kicked down the same garbage chute in life, and so we’re both just trying to survive. In our own ways.” Evil glanced down at his navel, and Crack instinctively knew to follow suit. “Now, when I look at the ways you go about survival, I think to myself, ‘that’s hilarious.’ But sometimes, when the rest of me isn’t looking, suddenly I think, ‘You’re so lucky. You got to stay kind and gentle. You’re not out causing chaos and destruction just ‘cause and dragging everyone else down with you.’ I meant what I said back there in the mindscape. Every last word. I meant it because you managed to go through all of that without ending up like I did.”
Crack finally let go of the carpet. He stared at Evil in incredulity. He pulled his ears tight, leaving Evil sure that he would tear them clean off. Then, his body now without direction, he fell flat on his belly. Evil thought he heard weeping. Crack soon hoisted himself up again, the swiftness of it coming as a surprise. Finally, he spoke.
“Are you INSANE?!?”
Evil did not argue. He already felt as if he had been eaten alive from the inside.
“It was you! It was you, Evil! You’re the one who has everything! You can go where you want and do what you want and not even give a fuck what happens next, to us or to yourself! You can play with fire and beat up clowns and get an army of squirrels to do your bidding and eat red meat and go to sleep in the dark! Me… I don’t know what I can do now because a lot of it is still missing, but the bear I was before couldn’t do any of that! I hate that bear! He couldn’t do anything at all, and the one silver lining is that I was too distracted to see it! And yeah, sometimes, I think you’re a self-destructive idiot, but nine times out of ten? You’re everything I can’t be. And then telling me that you envied me? Me? I’d say this was another one of your lies, Evil, if I wasn’t 100% sure you’d completely lost your mind.”
Evil tightly gripped his right arm, the sensation of its taut scar tissue buzzing through his digits. He did lose his mind. He lost his mind at a lot of crucial points in his life, and in those moments, it was the most important thing he could have done. He’d spilt his guts to convince the most freakishly suspicious bear on Earth that this was all coming directly from the heart.
Well. Not entirely.
“Do you want to know how I know I’m serious?”
“Oh, I am so ready.” Evil kept forgetting how sarcastic Crack could get. Always finding new ways to keep him on his toes.
There was no hesitation anymore. There was no choice. Evil kept his gaze directly on Crack, refusing to look down, nothing that could be construed as disguising a lie. All that they had was each other, and if they lost that, there’d be nothing left.
It was time to do the unthinkable.
“When I was a cub,” Evil began, “I was a circus bear.”
Crack was intrigued, giving Evil a gargoyle-like stare.
“The circus was worse than the zoo, if you can believe it. I was made to risk my life doing ridiculous stunts that, if they didn’t end in me getting burned alive and having knives thrown at me, ended in complete humiliation and degradation for the fleeting pleasure of an endless parade of humans. And were any of them grateful? No! The audience threw garbage at me just to hear me scream, and the ringleaders made me do it all again the very next day.”
“What does that have to do with me?” Crack asked, patience wearing thin. Evil couldn’t bring himself to get angry.
“The point is, we both had a breaking point. And when you hit that point, everything becomes clear, and suddenly, you can’t use your brain or hear your thoughts, because the whole rest of your body is screaming, ‘Fuck you! I’m running the show now!’ and gets you to where you need to be. Yours was The Great Christmas Betrayal, when you ran away and jumped into that truck to escape from everyone. Mine was… different. When I had mine, I set the circus on fire and watched as the whole thing burned down.
“I think about what might have happened if that had been you, or if I did what you did. If I had run away, that circus would still be travelling across Canada today. They would’ve found another ‘Fearless Bear Cub’ to torture. You might think that burning it down was for the greater good. But, do I look like someone who ever cared about the greater good?”
Crack’s eyes hovered towards Evil’s navel.
“Exactly. There weren’t any casualties in the fire. No injuries, either. But I wanted there to be. I wanted every human who ever hurt me to roast forever in the hell they sought to create. But now, I’m thinking about you jumping into that truck, and asking myself, ‘What would have happened if you did what I did? What would have happened if I got my way at the Shunnery meeting?’ I saw a Crack who does what I do, and so I already know the answer. The whole zoo in ashes. The family with nowhere to go and dying in the wild, if they hadn’t died in the fire. Sure, we’d have our revenge. But what would be left? Nothing at all.
“But you? What I said back in Central Park was 100% true. You made the right choice. And I’m glad you got me to follow you, because I know I wouldn’t have. I would’ve made everything worse. You didn’t want revenge. You never did. You just wanted to get out of there. And guess what? It worked! We made it! We haven’t seen the zoo in who knows how long? You did it, Crack! And I didn’t. That’s how I know I’m serious.”
Crack was entirely stuck for what to do in that moment. His body trembled as if each part of it were being fought over by different demons trying to possess it, and his jaw juddered and shook as if he were trying to say five things at once. He drove his arms into his mouth, but swiftly pulled them out before he could bite down. Evil had no clue what to think. All he could do was wait.
Once again, Crack lunged for the bucket. Evil took to his feet and swiped a bottle of water from the mini-fridge and placed it at Crack’s side. Sure enough, Crack finally regained something close to composure—shaking, but not fidgeting, and wheezing as if he had just taken a cinder block to the chest. He took a prodigious gulp of the water.
“I can’t believe we did all of this,” Crack panted. Evil had no clue whether he was proud, or disappointed, or horrified. Maybe he was all of those things at once. That was certainly how Evil felt, drenched in sweat in a mysterious room, no clue how far away he was or how long it had been, the stench of Crack’s vomit permeating the air.
“Me either,” replied Evil, “but it happened anyway.”
Evil then felt Crack gently cradling his right arm. It might have been because Crack still wasn’t at a stage where he could hug someone. It might have been out of consideration, knowing that Evil didn’t care for gooey heart stuff. He wasn’t about to ask himself what this uneasy sensation was that took him when he scrutinised this. Regardless, he chose to let it happen.
When Crack looked at Evil, he was sure that all that puking had made him dizzy, because he looked almost joyful.
“Thank you. And… it wasn’t your fault, either.”
The very idea of what he was saying made Evil sick. But, he knew it did not change the truth.
Everything was still. The room no longer spun, and nobody was shaking. Not even the hairs on the carpet shivered as the seconds marched on. The only sign that time hadn’t stopped was the gentle yet persistent hum of the mini fridge.
“Evil?”
“Yes, Crack?”
“Where the fuck are we?”
This visibly alerted Evil as he immediately rose from the floor. “I know about as much as you right now, but I’m gonna find out. We just need to figure out a way out of here without being exposed. Crack! Search the closet for disguises while I—”
There was a knock at the door. Crack and Evil’s ears curled at the sound. Whoever was there couldn’t possibly be looking for them. At least, that was what they hoped.
“Hello? Ant? Ant? Are you in here?”
Evil didn’t know who this man was. Yet, the sound of his voice made him feel ill in a way that felt so familiar. Visions of ISAD(G) cataloguing software and patios revealed themselves to him, unceremoniously, as if they would have slipped by unnoticed if Evil had not already been hit with a flurry of lost memories. He’d had enough of this. Throughout this whole journey, his mind was doing things he did not allow it to do. This would not stand. He could put a stop to it all if only this man would go away.
Crack took note of the look on his face, too pained for this to be mere annoyance. “Evil, who is this man?” Crack whispered.
“Shut up!” Evil whispered back, his mind far too busy to process anything new.
Apparently, not quietly enough. “Ant! Thank goodness!” He cried, voice growing more frenzied, “There you are! It’s me, Dale! I knew you were here somewhere, but when I asked around, nobody else remembered who ‘Anthony Brenner’ even was. I can’t help it! I’m the records guy! Anyway, you have to tell me what’s going on because I'm freaking out here! Just… God… one minute we were at the conference and the next you just disappeared, and then everything went all screwy! And… and… please! I just have to make sense of all this!”
As ‘Dale’ spoke, Evil gradually felt the muscles on his brow loosen up and his heart begin to slow. He felt that same sickness in his belly. But as the seconds went on and Dale continued to yelp, Evil sensed that it was not for the reason he thought it was, and suddenly, having a strange man at his beck and call didn’t seem so glamorous. He could smell papers he’d never read and feel old sores from shoes he'd never worn. Evil felt the hotel room walls press in on him, and nothing about this situation made any sense at all, but what he did know was that the synapses firing away in his head were telling him to do one thing.
“Dale?” Evil called out, trying and failing to sound calm, “I can hear you, can you hear me?”
“Ant! Am I ever glad to hear your voice again! Let me in, I need to see you! Just so I can… Make sure you exist? If that makes sense?”
“No!” Evil cried out, then immediately regretted it, “I can’t let you in, because… I’m… very sick!” Evil grabbed the bucket full of Crack’s vomit and placed it right where the door met the doorframe, wafting the fumes with the bathroom towel, “Yes! Smell that? Very, very sick! I… hope the… conference… went all right without me?” Evil could only assume that this was what he’d be concerned with, not being much of a creative writer or a detective.
“Oh, Ant, it was a disaster! They had to call the whole thing off! They all just went outside and started talking like nothing ever happened, and that there was never supposed to be a conference at all! There’s a lady from the Chicago warehouse who can’t even remember who she came with, and I think some of them don’t even know how they ended up in New Jersey! And most of them don’t even care! It’s madness! I had to find you. You’re gonna know about as much as me right now, but… you’re the only one left! I don’t know what else to do!”
Evil didn’t know who this ‘Ant’ individual was, or what made him so special. But that didn’t stop him from feeling so certain as his mind rushed to fill in the blanks, pulling anything and everything it could out of seemingly thin air. He knew he had no reason to believe any of it. Yet, the holy-shit-are-you-stupid neurons in his brain didn’t want to light up at the moment. Even then, in a situation like this, was there even any room to contemplate the finer details? Especially not when the man's desperate panting continued to reverberate through the door.
“Dale, get a grip on yourself!” Evil bellowed.
A yelp. And then, silence.
“Dale, everything that's happening is very confusing, but if you think I'm worth believing in, then I might as well listen. The conference was meant to be a big deal. I know that. And this was supposed to be the night you dazzled them all. I say, just because everyone forgot about it doesn’t mean that anything’s changed about you. You’re still the guy who deserved a place on that program. They’re still the people who recognised everything you’ve done. That means, if you proved yourself once, you can do it again.”
Evil would have thought that he was the last person to encourage anyone. He could have explained it all away by saying ‘Ant’ was the one doing the talking. Or at least, that’s what he would have done if this adventure hadn’t taught him anything at all. Being naturally above everyone else was one thing. Being a leader was another.
“And if they don’t, then I want you to remember one thing – you know things they don’t. And when you know things that others don’t, you had better take advantage of that however you want. You can even lie.”
“I have the information,” Dale gasped out, steadily approaching his revelation, “I’m a records manager.”
“…You sure are, Dale.” Evil agreed.
“I decide who gets access and who doesn’t!”
“Nobody else!”
“Best pep talk ever! I’m glad I can count on you to tell it like it is. But… about the flight. Do you think you’ll be well enough? You know, with the crowds and the turbulence and all the standing around and waiting?”
“Ah! As it turns out, I got a very interesting email.”
“Oh, God!” Panic began to rise in Dale’s voice, “Ant, I swear to God, I don’t know how this happened, but you have to believe I would never do anything to—”
“What are you talking about? It was from the office right here in… New Jersey,” Evil swiftly remembered, “Who said they heard all about my… work… and wanted me to join them. So you won’t expect to see me again back in… home.”
“Oh. Well, good for you, Ant! I knew your hard work would be recognised, only… how’ll I find someone half as good as you in Nevada?”
“…Have the cat do it?” Evil immediately regretted that statement. Even at a time like this, his impulse to wring a laugh out of anyone and everyone had to kick in.
Dale laughed riotously. Evil was sure the man’s spleen was about to burst from the force. “Of course… The cat…” Dale said, slow and stilted and hamming it up, “You trained him so well, after all!”
Holy shit… an inside joke… miracles like this only come once in a bullshitter’s lifetime.
“Thanks for everything, Ant! I’m going to miss you. You're a really good friend. With some good advice, too…” Dale snickered. The bears listened as the sound of his footfalls receded through the hallway. Once he had gone, Crack and Evil shared a deep sigh.
Evil’s relief did not last long. This new onset of memories was not like the others, which happened in a barrage of sharp, painful bursts. These ones arrived with no fanfare at all. Maybe it was because all the foundational memories had already been processed. Or maybe it was because his life as a human was so incredibly boring. He blinked once, and there was Dale’s face, as well as the faces of the rest of his colleagues. He blinked twice, and there was his car, the road that he traced between home and work, the traffic light he always tried to beat, the jogging club he would see whenever he ran late. He blinked three times, and there was his patio. Sure, it really belonged to Mark from Human Resources, but with the amount of work he’d contributed on it, it might as well be his patio.
Evil was supposed to have been surprised. He wished he had been surprised; then this all might have made sense. Instead, it was as if he always knew the ins and outs of warehouse management, the differences between archival appraisal systems, the best and worst coffee shop pastries, listings for apartments, spam emails, particularly annoying traffic lights, brass paperclips, and the most effective ways to waste time on the toilet while hiding from everyone else. Going to work, where people are allowed to know your name and your voice and your likes and dislikes, and coming home again. Coarse fabric and blistery shoes. Shaving. Budgeting. Socialising. Being human—and had just been momentarily distracted from it. Regardless, this did not make the revelation pleasant or comfortable.
Neither Evil nor Crack said a word.
“Hang on…” Evil soon said, not quite a command and not quite a question.
Evil had no clue what he looked like when this was all happening, but he pictured himself with his head tilted, staring off into nowhere. Crack had his arm in his mouth, like usual, but he was only nibbling on it, as if the part of him that wanted to do that wasn’t quite as committed. When he heard Evil speak up, he looked like he had been caught. “I know exactly what happened! I was there and so were you! We needed money, and we couldn’t beg on the streets any more, and so we had to get jobs! I… I remember picking out our suits! I remember applying, answering interviews! But… How did that turn into this?”
“I can’t claim to know how it happened, and even if I did, I would never be able to explain it with words,” Evil replied with care, “To be honest with you, I’m not sure I even want to know. But all that matters is that it’s over.” Crack was certain that he didn't want to know either. And yet, an uneasiness still nagged at him. “Are you sure? What if I go to sleep tonight and have nightmares about being late for work?”
“That’s just it, Crack,” Evil went on, intensity building in his voice, “You’re not supposed to have nightmares about being late for work. You’re not supposed to have a job! Anthony Brenner and Mitch Fremont are no more, and if they had graves, I would surely piss all over them.”
“But we had responsibilities! And people who depended on us! What’s going to happen to the warehouse and the archive and all of Spencer’s?”
The features of Evil’s face scrunched up and curdled. “I have only lived with these memories for a couple of minutes, but I am certain of one thing: Anthony Brenner sucks. Knowing that there was a version of me who lived in the human world, behaving like all of them, living by their rules because that’s just what you do and never dreaming of more…” the more he spoke, the more it looked like Evil was one provocation away from ripping out chunks of his own flesh, “…fills me with a terrible, bone-dissolving, stomach-inside-out-turning sickness. Being a bear wasn’t much better, but at least at the zoo we had our secret lives away from them all.”
“Our secret lives where we would pretend to be human anyway,” Crack’s impulses forced him to retort.
“Speak for yourself!” Evil scoffed, “You were collecting stuffed dollies like some dumb human with their Hogwarts house tattooed on their butt. And you slept in a bed! How high was the thread count in your sheets, anyway? Meanwhile, I was out hunting and foraging and sleeping in straw!”
“You were terrible at all that.”
“Bup-bup-bup! You didn’t let me finish. I was gonna say that I might not have been good at foraging or hunting, but I could have been! If it wasn’t for the humans getting to me before I could learn those things like every other bear.”
It was then that Crack’s brow dropped like an anvil. “Evil, how much of our lives back then do you actually remember?” he began to yell, “Every single one of us sucked at being bears! And you can’t even blame the humans for it, because you don’t see the lions acting like us! And what about me? I grew up in the wild, and there I was collecting stuffed dollies like some dumb human with a something something something. Hell, I wish I were a human! Mitch might have been up to his eyeballs in stress, but he was one human in a million. Nobody cared who he was or what he did! Yeah, he had problems. What human doesn’t? But at least they weren’t mine.”
Crack didn't have to say much for Evil to know exactly what he was talking about. The two of them had led so many different lives, and in each one, there was another self to hate. He was sure that if Mitch were around today, he would be just as disgusted with his former self as Evil was with his. Evil knew he was never meant to be a human. But—and maybe it was just the present moment talking, and maybe it was the hard, unfiltered truth—Evil’s view of his bear selves wasn’t much better. And of course Crack wasn’t happy. Because, believe it or not, the Discount Zoo was not a very nurturing environment for a professional phobia collector.
“You know… Now that I think about it, eating a live animal is a perfectly normal thing for a bear to do,” Evil said.
Crack gripped his shoulders so tightly it was as if he was intent on tearing the flesh right off of them. He buried his head into himself. Then, he sat perfectly still, which Evil found the most unnerving of all. Then, his head swivelled straight towards Evil. Evil waited for him to speak, but no words came out. Evil could tell that his words resonated with him, but he would not be satisfied until he got the closure of hearing them from his mouth.
“I didn’t say it at the time. I never could have, because I took it all for granted. Even when I was fighting against them, I was still conforming. Conforming to something bigger than Prozac, bigger than all of them. I don’t even think they know, or… knew. They just wanted to dress up. Read dirty magazines. Paint their nails. Collect Star Wars figurines. Watch TV. Maybe every other bear in every other zoo and even in the wild would do the same thing—that is, if I’m not just trying to feel better about myself by saying it.”
Crack’s silence continued. He seemed to have calmed down, if only because he was so deep in thought.
“…It is a normal thing for a bear to do,” Crack finally said, “And they punished me for it.”
“They did, Crack, and that’s entirely my point. Nobody at that zoo knew how to be a bear. And if their lives were anything like mine, they never had a chance. That’s why we were all so terrified of being thrown into the wild. We knew we didn’t belong there! Do you remember when Tanked got lost? Lech tried to hunt for him based on what he learned from Mantracker, a crappy reality show. He was a bear pretending to be human pretending to be a bear. I certainly didn’t belong in the wild. If Sloth hadn’t been there with an army of squirrel lackeys for me to commandeer, I would have died out there. And no matter how much you can dream about it, you know you were never supposed to be human, either. We had to repress our entire lives for it to work, and all it took for the whole thing to come apart was us just looking at each other. We sucked at being bears, and we sucked at being humans. We’re just… losers, is what we are.”
Crack thought about all that Evil had said, and knew it to be true. It didn’t take much introspection for him to get there. He always knew it. He was a loser in the zoo, and he was a loser outside of it, too. His thoughts forced themselves on a singular path, one that told him that if he had only chosen to stay at the zoo, none of this would have happened, and he would never have had to learn this. He would never have had to question who, or rather, what he was supposed to be, and he would never have had to face the fact that there was just no way out for any of them. There was no way they could possibly return to the zoo, or go back to work, or go anywhere. Bear or human, they would be lying either way.
But at the same time, Crack knew that this had to be the way. He had to confront this. He knew that all those years ago, he climbed into that truck because he could. Because, regardless of how it happened, he was finally ready to take risks for once. This had been the most important choice of his life. He was right about it then, and he was right about it now.
“Evil? Do you remember that bear we met? At the Central Park Zoo?”
“What about him?” Evil replied. It didn’t take long at all for him to respond.
“You and I were so convinced that he was nothing but a wet blanket. He lived in a zoo where the keepers were fully aware of what the animals were really like, but he went around like he was 100% content to be a stupid animal. But now I’m thinking, he’s never done human stuff like we have. He hasn’t had a constant stream of stupid movies and toys and magazines filling his head and telling him what life should be like. That’s why we were bored all the time! We were brainwashed! Bamboozled! Maybe he wanted to play with the big log because he just liked the big log!”
Evil took his time. It was clear that he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t, for all the racing thoughts that pounded down on him like a torrent.
“…What’s your point?” He finally said.
Of course, Evil already knew what Crack was going to say. He knew it could probably never be done, he knew it was definitely too late for them, and he knew that, despite those things, it was the only path he could take, as unavoidable as time itself. He just needed to hear it for himself, so that he could finally stop denying it. So that he knew he wasn’t going completely insane.
Maybe he believed it all along.
Evil left his seat, and climbed up on the truck’s left wheel tub. He looked down, watching the road slip out from under his feet. On a base level, he understood why someone would want to leave the Discount Zoo. He understood why someone like Crack would want to get out of there. Evil had a pretty long list of why he’d want to run off and leave everyone languishing in their own juices too, and he was just about certain that everyone else had their reasons. But of course, all those people were still there. They never acted on them. There had to be a catalyst, that one breaking point that pushed them out. Evil had no trouble guessing what Crack’s might have been, and if not that, there would’ve been a million and one other things for him to flee from, because believe it or not, the Discount Zoo is not a very nurturing environment for a professional phobia collector. He could tell that Crack wasn’t nearly as certain as he sounded—he was pretty transparent that way—but it was an assured kind of uncertainty. Was he stupid? Was he admirable? None of that matters when you’re hiding in the back of a truck in the middle of nowhere. Evil looked down at his navel. He was no stranger to fate.