Grizzly
COUPE WOKE UP IN A HOSPITAL ROOM. He wasn't entirely certain what had happened. Most was a blank.
He could see in his memory flashes. Waking up in bed with a huge grizzly bear. Being chained to it by his ankle. The bear waking up. A mouth full of razor sharp teeth. Screams. Pain. Now this.
He was hooked up to a beeping heart monitor and could see with the one uncovered eye an I.V. connected to his right arm. He looked down and both his legs were bandaged and he couldn't move them. His left arm was... gone.
The heart monitor started beeping faster and faster. He felt a woozy panic. A nurse—heavy set, black, wearing greenish scrubs—rushed in and put a needle in to the I.V. tube.
"You calm down, now. Didn't expect you to wake up for another few hours, Mr. Blue. Here's something to dull the pain," she said with a soothing and comforting tone.
He almost immediately went to sleep but not before hearing the angry roar of a feral monster.
✶
LIKE ANY OTHER MORNING, COUPE WOKE UP HOURS BEFORE HIS WIFE. She didn't work any sort of traditional job so she was used to sleeping in a bit. She called it chinching. Coupe was a crack of dawn type. Whether he wanted to or not, he popped conscious around 5 a.m. every morning, made coffee, smoked, did some early morning work, went to the gym, took a shower all before his wife even opened her eyes.
It wasn't that she was lazy, Coupe reasoned. She simply didn't fit the normal standard of job. He told her once, as a way to make her feel better, that she didn't suffer bad management so she had a hard time holding down any sort of steady gig. He was happy to work and foot the bills as she explored possibilities. She mostly found random jobs via Craigslist and then spent much of her time at the pool (during pool season) or wandering around casinos, looking for slot vouchers left behind.
He was someone who enjoyed a sense of routine. She was not. They had made the difference work, though, so when he slowly stretched into the waking world and heard a beast's heavy, slow breathing next to him, he was shocked into immediate vigilance.
His wife was not next to him.
Instead, he was chained to to a 400-pound grizzly bear by a golden shackle and chain, which was likewise clasped around the leg of the bear.
Coupe recalled the only experience he could in an inappropriate moment given his immediate peril. In college, his first roommate embarked on a campaign to chase him out of the shared dorm room. Loud music in the morning, his clothes put in bags outside the room, this guy tried everything to get Coupe to move to another dorm. Finally, Coupe awakened to a German Shepherd chained to his bed. The dog was pissed off and Coupe was naturally scared. But he calmed the dog down and re-chained him to the roommate's bed where it shit and pissed.
He didn't know how to calm down a sleeping bear the size of three people combined but he thought he might be able to escape as long as he didn't wake the creature up.
He reached slowly to his ankle. The cuff was tight and the lock a serious one. He gently tested the chain, thinking maybe it was weak enough to pull apart. It was not. The grizzly stirred a bit. He froze. After a few minutes, he tried to pry the cuff from his ankle. No dice. He was stuck.
He lied there, the beast breathing slowly, and wondered what happened? Where was his wife? Did she do this to him? Why?
He thought back to find any clues that might indicate that she'd chain him to a bear. First was how? How did she even get a grizzly bear into their one bedroom apartment without him hearing, let alone chaining him to it, let alone not be killed herself in the doing? Second was why? What'd he do to instigate this? Why a bear and not, say, a scorpion or snake?
After lying next to the hulking animal for nearly three hours, he decided to risk calling for help. This, he soon discovered, was a mistake. The bear startled awake, turned its huge mass his way and, in an almost casual manner, attacked him viciously as if he were no more than a salmon. The bear slashed at him with her massive claws and chomped down on his arm. She lifted him up and shook him like a dog shaking a squeak toy. He screamed in pain, in surprise, and in the realization that he was going to die in minutes.
✶
HIS SISTER SAT NEXT TO HIS BED AS HE WOKE UP AGAIN.
"What happened?" he croaked.
"Coupe. Brother. Was last week the first time you noticed you were married to a grizzly bear?"
"What? That's stupid. I woke up chained to one but I'm not married to a fucking bear!"
"She was a bear all along, dude. None of us could understand it. For some reason, you thought this wild animal was a person. Your wife. She couldn't come inside for Christmas because she was a fucking bear so you justified it by telling yourself she just loved the outdoors. She liked to camp or some other happy horseshit.
"Remember when Werner Herzog came out with the documentary Grizzly Man and everyone bought you the DVD? We all thought you would suddenly recognize another man convinced of the humanity of a wild creature like it was a Pixar character or something. The guy gets mauled to death because animals are not human. They're animals. They exist to eat, fuck, shit, and survive without any human empathy or emotions. Bears don't care about you. They only care about their own survival and will rip anything that threatens that to shreds."
"Wait. You believe that Geena was a bear?"
"No. You believed she was a human being. She was always a bear. Look."
She pulled up her pictures app on her iPhone. There was a picture of him in front of the Chapel of the Bells in Vegas where he and Geena got married. It was a picture of him kissing a hulking brown grizzly.
"That's... that's not real. That's photoshopped or something."
She started swiping through pictures that should've been he and Geena—in Cancun, Paris, London, St. John, Chicago—but were photos of him with a freaking bear.
"You really think I photoshopped all of these? Face it. You were blinded by something deep in your brain that had you convinced this bear was a beautiful woman. I'm just thankful you realized the mistake before she just outright killed you. Sure, you're gonna be seriously scarred, even after plastic surgery, and you'll never get the arm back but at least you're alive."
Coupe swiped past hundreds of pictures. No Geena. Always a bear. And him, looking lovingly at the bear.
"So, you're telling me..."
"I'm telling you that Geena was a bear. And for some reason you woke up two weeks ago and saw what we've all seen since you brought her home."
"That she is a wild animal."
"Yes."
"Where is she now?"
"Animal Control came, sedated her, and took her to the zoo. She's been living in apartments with you for the past six years so she isn't fit for the wild."
"The zoo."
"The zoo."
✶
FIVE MONTHS AND SEVEN SURGERIES LATER, COUPE FOUND HIMSELF AT THE ZOO, STARING INTO THE BEAR HABITAT. To his eyes, there were four bears in the inclosure and Geena. Geena didn't look like a bear to him but like his wife. Dressed like a teenager in the ‘90s, grinning that crooked grin of hers.
"Hey, baby. I don't know what to say. They tell me you’re a bear but I can see you're not. They tell me my judgment is highly suspect and that it may be a delusional aspect to my personality, the need to see what I want to see rather than what is really there."
Geena ambled up to Coupe, separated by a cage and an artificial moat. She reached into the moat and pulled out a writhing fish and stuffed it into her mouth.
"Yeah," Coupe said. "I love you, too."
