Something trying to claw its way out: "Bears Among the Living" by Kevin Moffett

There's a lot of overlap between the work of comics and the work of fiction writers. Both entertain, both observe the every day in a way that can make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, and both tell stories. Some comics are less narrative than others. The less narrative ones tend to have kind of abrupt transitions from one subject to another. Jerry Seinfeld's "what's the deal with lampshades?" was meant to be a joke lampoon of bad comedy, but even good comics who meander from subject to subject will sometimes abruptly introduce their new topic. "Hey, anyone in the audience have young kids?" they will ask, and then we know they're going to riff on the adventures of parenting for a little while. We might get a little story here and there about something that happened to the comic recently, but they're likely to soon switch to something new. 

Other comics, though, will use a more or less continuous narrative throughout an entire set or through a long part of a set. Even if they move from one story to another, there is sometimes a theme holding all of the act together. Pete Holmes did this in his Netflix special "Dirty Clean." 

From its opening line, "Bears Among the Living" reads a lot like a comedy act. Its first line is a tautological joke: "They call our town the City of Trees because of the trees." That's the kind of material Steven Wright or Bob Newhart might have used. As the "narrative" continues, we are getting stories, but they seem to be coming rather spontaneously, rather than building in a carefully controlled way toward a single goal the way most narrative does. Nearly all of the little episodes are comedic or contain comedic lines. The style feels almost spoken rather than written, with some exceptions. ("The summer he died is a smear of wildfires and hostile fauna" is an example of a more "writerly" passage.) 

One result of this comic-on-stage delivery is that I found myself wondering as I read whether the story was largely auto-biographical. Usually, I find this an annoying and irrelevant question. Whenever a writer does a reading somewhere and someone in the audience asks whether the events in the story really happened, I feel peeved. It shouldn't matter. In this story, though, the very specific nature of the anecdotes felt somehow different from normal fiction. I was going to actually Google the writer and this story to see if I could find anything about whether this was auto-biographical (which I almost never do), but then the penultimate line of the story pretty much gives it away. "Do you think this is a game, Kevin?" when written by an author named Kevin is pretty much inviting us to read this auto-biographically, even if he made parts of it up. 

"What a nice night for an evening" fits the comedic vibe of much of "Bears Among the Living."

What holds it together

As with the best comedians, the seemingly random and spontaneous stringing together of amusing anecdotes has something holding it all together. Most of the characters in the town are living fairly parochial lives. "The limits of my language," the narrator/Kevin says, paraphrasing Wittgenstein, "are the limits of my town," and much of the story is confined by the city limits of the "City of Trees." When Kevin goes jogging every day, something that might be thought of as a chance to break free, even his jog is circumscribed by the town's streets, which he compares to both lines on a page and to algebra problems. He runs "Seventh to Mountain, Mountain to Baseline, Baseline to Mills, Mills to Bonita." 

He and everyone else in the town seem to voluntarily keep themselves pent up in the town. Maybe it's because life is scary. Kevin's son worries about creatures at the bottom of the sea or a planet filled with monsters. Kevin reassures him that he'll never go to these places, and it's better for him to worry about the DMV. The son, though, isn't as comforted by these reassurances as Kevin intends, because the son's "sense of danger is prehistoric, wiser than words." When Kevin tries to get him to brush his teeth, his son asks if tigers brush their teeth, seeming to ask what good our civilized norms are in the face of the savage universe.

Indeed, "something prehistoric" seems to be breaking out all over the manicured confines of the town. There are coyotes that invade the town that only become meaner when someone tries to poison them. 

Much more than the prehistoric things trying to break into the town, though, the thing that threatens the peace seems to be what's trying to get out. When talking with his mother, Kevin finds that there was something in her attic that she thought was "trying to claw its way in--turns out something was trying to claw its way out..." On closer inspection, it looks like the town is full of things trying to claw their way out, to go investigate the dangerous wilds beyond the town. One is Kevin's dog, who, if not for the "orange leash clipped to his collar," would go off "sprinting toward the foothills, never to return." 

The thing that is most trying to break out of the quiet of the town, though, is Kevin himself. From the beginning, we find that as he is sitting in the park reading, he is unintentionally causing a disturbance among the town's proper ladies because his fly is down. He admits this is happening a lot. Is it really unintentional, or is something primal in him trying to "claw its way out," to break beyond the limits placed on him? Is this why Kevin sometimes finds himself saying out loud things he meant to keep to himself? 

Kevin also admits guiltily to sojourns out to the "Top Dogs," a fast-food joint just beyond the limits of town (because the town has outlawed such places). Why would the town outlaw them? Is it because the "dog" in "Top Dogs" reminds people of their primitive urges to escape? Is this why the place just beyond the limits of the town is in a shopping center with so many other seedy and primitive-urge satisfying establishments? 

Comforts, looking the other way, and belief systems

The whole town, it seems, is troubled by the fact that the world is actually a terrifying place. We have built a town (which could stand for any civilized corner of the world) in which we can pretend the world isn't full of terror, but it still is. In order to keep ourselves from running off to face the terror or worrying about being eaten alive by it where we stand, the citizens of the town rely on three coping mechanisms: comforts, looking away, and belief systems. 

Comforts

Nearly everyone in town seeks comfort. This is why the ice cream man has a job. The ice cream man "tunnels into our town, solves our streets, turns on his music, and waits like a spider." This "solving" of streets recalls the earlier metaphor of the streets as algebra problems. Is the ice cream man a benevolent figure, though? Kevin has compared him to a "spider," another primitive threat invading the town. However, he also compares him to that paragon of protection for civilization, the fireman. "If we let him, the ice cream man would notice even the faintest tremor of need and drive toward it at once. What a fireman is to a burning building, and ice cream man is to our desire for ice cream." 

The ice cream man isn't a spider because he eats us alive; he's a spider because of how finely he feels tremors. When people in town are worried about the terror of the world they live in, the ice cream man is there to bring us the food we probably most associate with eating our feelings. He's there to make us forget about it with ice cream.

Kevin's mother is the ultimate example of someone who uses consumer culture to comfort herself. She could "never shed her unblinking faith in products she saw advertised on television." She romanticizes a moment of her life with Kevin's father because it reminds her of something two celebrities did, recalling for us as readers of people in our world who bury themselves in tabloid news in order to not think about their own lives. 

Kevin's own son seems drawn to comforts, too. He argues about bringing more toys (comforts) with him to bed than his mother wishes. He wants to be reassured that the lyrics to the song "Superman" by R.E.M. say "I am Superman/and I CAN do anything," rather than "can't." Kevin does his best to reassure his son, but something in his son rejects this reassurance, perhaps reflecting the unsettled part of Kevin that still isn't fully civilized. This is why his son asks about whether tigers brush their teeth. 

Looking away

When Kevin's father died when Kevin was still young, a well-meaning friend came and took all his father's clothes to The Salvation Army. She did this because she "thought she was doing us a favor, scrubbing our closet of unwanted reminders." One way of dealing with tragedy and the reminder that none of us is really safe in the world is to try to move on, to clear up reminders of the unhappiness. However, the plan completely fails. "Years later we'd still see his golf shirts all around town. On a man pumping gas into a motorcycle. On a supermarket bag boy." No matter how much we try to suppress knowledge of our mortality, it always keeps "clawing out." 

Belief systems

A third way people try to deal with the uncomfortable facts of the universe that threaten the "bedroom community" Kevin lives in are belief systems. In some ways, these seem a little more hopeful. They do acknowledge the uncomfortable facts of life instead of trying to hide them. Kevin recalls one "wannabe Amish guy" who showed his daughter pictures with "crying dwarves" on them. He wanted "to teach her that the world isn't as uncomplicated as she thinks it is." This is the beginning of belief systems in Kevin's world. They accept that the world is actually terrifying as their first step. 

However, the problem that Kevin keeps facing is that these belief systems never quite make sense to him. His mother tried being a born-again Christian for a while, but it didn't take. Kevin never quite understood basic ideas like what prayer was supposed to be, but he still found that "the idea that I was born incomplete and that my natural inclinations are faulty, damnable even, has always rung true to me." He senses there might be some truth there, but it doesn't make enough sense that anyone can be more than a "wannabe" member of any belief system. 

When Kevin sees that someone has scrawled "Black Sabbath Rules" on a bus, he thinks it is a reference to an actual system of rules. He earnestly wants to know what the rules are. He is seeking a system that will make the world make sense, even with all the horror in it, but he is continually operating under mistaken assumptions that undo his ability to find such a system.  

When Kevin's mother went on her one singles' outing after his father died, she ran into a karate instructor. She thought the instructor was hitting on her, but he was actually trying to sell karate lessons. His pitch appealed to the belief system his dojo taught. It was founded on "four pillars of respect," (which somewhat recalls the four noble truths of Buddhism). We never find out what the four pillars are, but his mother misreads one of them as "custard." I tend to think the real word was "courtesy" or something like that, but his mother, who clings to comforts and pleasure as her coping mechanism, wants instead to read it as ice cream, the ultimate symbol in the story of drowning your worries with materialism. 

Kevin feels that as a father, he should have passed along some kind of bedrock beliefs to his son, but he simply couldn't. "I know there are other things I should be showing him--truths, values, important concepts--but how can I if I'm still not clear on the particulars myself?" 

The central image

How to read the "bear among the living" that gives the story its title? I think it's meant to say that all of us has the potential to remind others of the terror in the world. 

"We are bears among the living, agile and fearsome. We range and rut. We hunt. We return to our dens to sleep and let torpid winters seal our wounds. When we die our pelts are stripped from our bones, draped over plausible likenesses, nailed to pedestals in telltale poses. Children still flinch at the sight of us..."

To lessen our potential to frighten others, even our memory is banished to the "garage" and afterwards, that memory is shrunk down to a teddy bear, the type of toy a child brings to bed to comfort them from the primordial fears we all have at night. 

This story, which seems on the surface to be a wandering comedic bit, is actually one of the darkest stories I've ever read. At times, it seems like the comic is randomly bringing up subjects. (Lately, I've been thinking about the ice cream man.") But this seeming randomness is all arranged with incredible skill. It's one of the most sophisticated short stories I've ever read. Like Kevin's phone conversations with his mother, it's not just the wandering, chaotic, disconnected series of conversations it seems to be. It's a "punishing labyrinth." 

If there is any comfort in this story, it's that we are "navigating (this labyrinth) together." We are "careful not to lose our way, careful to measure where we're going against where we've been." I don't know how many of us succeed in that, but the story certainly does, as much as any I've ever read.