Bernie and the Panda

Really, before the panda came into his life, Bernard Henry Moore’s story was quite an unremarkable one. What happened afterwards, however, was more than remarkable. Although it never did make the news as much as it probably would have in a bigger town; Bakersville has never liked too much outside attention, not then, and not now. With a population that has always floated in the general vicinity of the 6000 mark, it’s a small town, a tight town; a town that likes to bury its secrets and then sit on them. Of course, with Bernie, there was a lot to bury.

The first time Bernie set foot in Bakersville – quite literally, stepping off the Inter-City Bus – he was about five years old, one hand holding on to his grandmother’s and the other to a rather plump penguin. He came straight from his mother’s funeral. She had succumbed to advanced cirrhosis of the liver, as dedicated alcoholics are often prone to. Not that she was the only drinker in the family; his father had indulged with equal, if not greater, gusto – in fact, rumor had it that both their marriage and Bernie’s conception were the outcome of an extended binge.  The father wasn’t at the funeral. This was because he’d made himself scarce about two years ago, when in the middle of a heated – and very drunk – argument with his wife, he decided knocking Bernie down the stairs of their house was a good way to make whatever point he was trying to make.

Thankfully for Bernie, it wasn’t a particularly long flight of stairs, so he survived with a nasty knock on the head, a few choice bruises and a shattered femur on his left foot. Hearing the commotion, their then-neighbors called the Cops, but by the time they arrived the father was long gone; and stayed that way – although, it would be fair to say Bernie’s Mom hadn’t looked very hard for him; and perhaps the police had stopped looking very hard too, after a while.

The broken femur didn’t heal quite right, and left him with a permanent limp. As for the knock on the head, the Doctors said it hadn’t done any permanent damage, but maybe it had, because Bernie grew up a little…odd.

I still remember him on that first day; a chubby child with a pronounced limp and unusually large eyes. Every now and again, he would fleetingly train those big eyes of his on the small group of spectators that had gathered to receive them (Mathilda ‘Mattie’ Louise, Bernie’s maternal grandmother was a longtime resident of Bakersville – married there and widowed there – and Bernie’s tragic circumstances were common knowledge by the time she went to collect her only grandson from her only and estranged daughter’s up-state funeral), blink rapidly, and hug his penguin tighter for comfort. As he limped alongside his Grandma, a large yellow knapsack weighed him down, and if you walked close enough to peek under its flap, you could see a lot of small animals squeezed in there. Not very different from the penguin he was cradling.

Before maiming him and disappearing for good, Bernie’s Dad had briefly transported consignments for a soft-toy manufacturer. On every trip he managed to ‘liberate’ a few animals and bring them home to Bernie, much to his delight and wonder.  These were possibly the only toys Bernie got as a child, and he’d grown extremely attached to them.

 Bernie hadn’t carried a lot from his old life with him to Bakersville – perhaps there wasn’t much worth carrying – but he’d carried his stuffed animals close to him. And they stayed close to him for all the years that he lived here, closer than most real people he got to know.

Yes, he was always a little ‘odd’, was Bernie; uncommunicative, withdrawn and disconnected from other people. Of course, back then terms like ADD, Autism and such were not in common parlance with our local practitioners, neither were they in the habit of diagnosing children who seemed different from the rest and highly introverted with any deep psychological conditions. And perhaps he didn’t really suffer from any of these disorders; perhaps that knock on the head had left him this way, or perhaps he’d seen just enough ugliness in the years he’d lived with his parents to make him retreat to worlds of his own making, where there wasn’t any - with imaginary friends of his own choice; living and talking versions of his toys. A lot of kids do that when they’re growing up – it’s just that Bernie never stopped. He was always the happiest when left alone with those stuffed animals, or with books and TV shows of fantasy fiction – Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and such - that took him to places not unlike the ones in his own imagination. He wasn’t obtuse, he got by in school; spoke and did just as much as he absolutely had to, but he clearly didn’t enjoy it. The only person he wasn’t so withdrawn around was his Grandma Mattie; in his own way he’d grown to love her and sometimes he even had conversations with her about his imaginary worlds and how his toys came alive there.

She in turn doted on him. Perhaps she felt he would have turned out different if she had just brought him home when she first realized that her daughter had no intention of kicking her addiction even after the baby was born; instead of withdrawing. In any case, she tried her best to give Bernie a loving home, despite his frequent emotional detachment.  And she never tried turning Bernie away from whatever and whoever he liked being; so she never tried getting rid of the toys, even after he’d far outgrown the normal age for such fixations.

Of course, children can be notoriously intolerant towards members of their own kind who they perceive as ‘different’ and understandably, school here wasn’t the easiest of times for Bernie. The fact that he always carried one or the other of his toy animals with him – clutched in plain sight in junior school, and stuffed deep inside his bag in the senior years – didn’t help matters at all. He certainly didn’t make any human friends and on his best day was ignored by the others (which was fine by him) and on his worst, became the butt of their jokes – sometimes humiliating, sometimes plain cruel. Things could have gotten worse if it hadn’t been for three things.

For one, he never took their bait, never ever reacted with aggression or teary outbursts. All their jibes and occasional physical provocations seemed to just bounce off him; it was like he immediately retreated in to whatever world lay inside his head, and there, he was untouchable; leaving the other kids bored and seeking other ‘entertainment’.

The second reason was undoubtedly the high respect the townsfolk had for Mattie and the quite healthy fear the kids had of her. She was a tough, no-nonsense old broad, not averse to smacking little (and not-so-little) kids, if they got on her wrong side. And picking on Bernie was the quickest path to said wrong side.

The third thing that worked in Bernie’s favor was his size. By the time he was in High School he’d grown enormous, both in height and girth. He could easily pass for a quarter-back, except he never showed any inclination towards football, or any other sport. He still had the limp, and inside he was still a diffident child probably not comfortable in his own skin, but his sheer bulk was intimidating enough to keep most people from messing with him now, even though he remained placid, always. Well, almost always, except for the incident with Grady Wilkinson.

Grady Wilkinson was smooth and he was sharp, much like the razor he shared his last name with. He had a lithe frame, with none of the bulk that Bernie did, but well-toned muscles instead. He was almost as tall as Bernie, which was pretty tall. So no surprises that he was Captain of the Basketball team and a champion Track and Field athlete for Bakersville High. He also had clean-cut looks and an easy charm that endeared him greatly to the girls, and made the boys see a natural leader in him. Yes, Grady Wilkinson was one of the shining stars of Bakersville High and he didn’t usually have to go looking for attention or acquiescence, they came to him like pups hungry for petting.

Local lore has it, on that particular day, Grady was shooting some solo hoops at the school’s Basketball court; grandstanding for his mates and a group of admiring cheerleaders. After a series of effortless three-pointers, the law of averages kicked in, and one teetered on the rim and then bounced off the court onto the adjoining grassy knoll. It rolled to a halt a few inches away from where Bernie sat cross-legged; reading The Tales of Brer Rabbit, with a tiny stuffed chimp sticking out of his over-sized shirt pocket. As was often the case, Bernie appeared oblivious to everything else in his vicinity, including the ball, and the voices now screaming at him to, ‘’Throw it back, you chump.’’

Since he was the closest, Grady took a couple of steps towards Bernie and shouted for the ball again. When Bernie remained unmoved and unresponsive, Grady stared at his massive back in exasperation for an instant and then decided to move in closer. He walked up to where Bernie sat – an imperturbable Buddha – and stood over him, with the ball now resting between them. He picked it up and then said, ‘’Dude, You got fat in your ears too? Why didn’t you throw back the ball, man?’’

Bernie finally looked up; blinking rapidly at this distraction, he simply said, ‘’I’m reading.’’ And then he turned back to his book, clearly done with the matter.

Now Grady wasn’t a bully by nature, but the thing was, he just wasn’t used to being summarily dismissed in this fashion, especially by a junior, in the presence of some of the prettiest girls in school. It was annoying, and what he did next was purely an instinctive reaction to this annoyance. The ball shot out of his hands and hit Bernie squarely on his back. While all it did to Bernie was to jar him slightly, it ricocheted off that broad back and shot back at Grady, catching him plumb in the stomach.  As he doubled over from the impact, the wind knocked out of him, Grady heard laughter - mostly female - from the spectators.  Understandably, this pissed him off even more. He sprang back up, grabbed Bernie by his collar and screamed into his face: ‘’Learn some respect, you freak.’’ Then, in a rather curious expression of hostility, he snatched the chimp from Bernie’s pocket and launched it into the depths of a nearby trash-can. In retrospect, perhaps he too realized that this was a rather juvenile reaction, but if provoking Bernie was the intent, it succeeded. While he seemed unmoved by personal provocation, any perceived threat to his inanimate playmates apparently evoked a fierce response.

A low snarl escaped his lips as he dropped his book and rose to his feet, with speed belying his ponderous bulk. He loomed above the still belligerent – but now slightly wary – Grady, looked from him to the rudely trashed chimp, and then grabbed him by his collar and lifted him. He held him up quite effortlessly and shook him, while all the taken-aback Grady could do was to flail his arms, ineffectually, in Bernie’s face. They stood framed like that for a moment; a giant of a boy holding another not-so-puny-himself boy aloft and shaking him like a rag doll. Then Bernie stepped to the trash-can, and bent to retrieve the chimp with his free hand. At precisely the same instant, the still-thrashing Grady’s collar ripped, and he dropped from Bernie’s grasp straight into the trash-can, butt-first. Bernie himself seemed to have lost all interest in Grady by then and busied himself in brushing off the chimp and then gathering up his book. As Grady’s mates helped him out of the trash-can, the Phys Ed teacher stormed over to see what the ruckus was all about, and effectively quelled any further escalation.  Later, a hastily convened meeting comprising him, Mattie and the Hutchinsons enforced a lasting truce between the boys. Bernie remained his distant and sparingly responsive self, with no other instances of palpable aggression in school and Grady had enough on his plate to move on and just pretend the former didn’t exist. And that was pretty much that for them.

Except the incident with the panda, of course, but that came years later.

Anyway, after eventually scraping his way through school, Bernie had absolutely no interest in studying any further, and perhaps his grandmother, too, felt he wasn’t exactly cut out for college, because, right after, he began assisting her full-time at Cakes ‘n’ Bakes – the rather unimaginatively named Bakery she owned. He seemed to quite enjoy his time there; an assortment of soft toys adorning a shelf behind the counter and his growing supply of books kept in easy reach to occupy his breaks. He even cracked the occasional smile, while serving customers, arranging the cakes, pastries and other confections in pleasing sequences or just licking the batter in the kitchen. Mattie, and most of her customers, liked having him there too. For Bernie, life existed in a happy, largely uneventful bubble for the next 5 years or so.

Then the bubble burst abruptly, when Mattie passed away.    

Mattie had her first heart-attack two years before the one that killed her; right in the middle of making Layered Cake for Tommy Faulkner’s sixth birthday. As they rushed her to the hospital, she was screaming to the other ladies in the kitchen not to forget her homemade nutmeg and cinnamon dust mix for the batter. Back then, the Doctor told her she needed to quit smoking right away.  Two years later, when Bernie went to wake her up one morning and couldn’t, her bedside ashtray was as full of mangled butts as it had ever been. Apparently she had passed away in her sleep.

She left Bernie enough money to lead a modest existence for a few years, the house, and, of course, Cakes ‘n’ Bakes. What she didn’t leave him with, however, was either the managerial skills or the culinary expertise to run it. And although some folks in town suggested that Bernie could just retain the staff and hire a Manager to run things, all the decision-making and financial supervision that would entail left Bernie cold. He just wasn’t made for enterprise. So, Cakes ‘n’ Bakes shut its doors for good within a month of Mattie passing away.

As for Bernie, he quickly became the town’s youngest – and really, only – recluse. He withdrew further into his shell and his house, surrounded by his toys, his books, his fantasies and his Grandma’s memories, hardly ever surfacing. He watched cartoons on TV, ordered take-out a lot, and grew even bigger by the day. Some of us tried visiting him once in awhile, but soon, his obvious aversion to socializing and conversations put an end to that. Thereafter, the only real human contact Bernie had were on his infrequent market visits to buy essentials, and with Mrs. Hobbins, who came by to clean the house twice a week. And truth be told, he seemed perfectly at ease with being alone - happy even, in a world of his own.  Things might have stayed that way indefinitely, but then, the Happy Panda arrived in town, and into his life.

Actually, it’s fair to say that the Happy Panda arrived in Bernie’s life before it did in Bakersville.

The Happy Panda was a chain of ‘authentic’ Chinese Restaurants (well, there were two of them) in towns neighboring Bakersville, owned by an ageing entrepreneur named Richard Dawkins, who hailed from one of those towns. Mr. Dawkins had spent his middle-age in China and had even been married there, to a native. The marriage didn’t last, but what did last was his love for Asian cuisine and his earnest desire to bring it back to our country. For awhile, he had been looking for a suitable property to extend his chain to Bakersville – it’s difficult to say why, considering  folks in town didn’t really have a taste for anything outside of all-American food (barring the occasional Mexican recipe) and there wasn’t so much as a Chinese takeaway joint there. But, perhaps, that was why. Be that as it may, when news of Cakes ‘n’ Bakes shutting down reached Mr. Dawkins, he knew his opportunity had arrived. The bake-shop – with its central location, giant kitchen and under-utilized space – was just the kind of property he was looking for.

The first difficulty for Mr. Dawkins was approaching the reclusive Bernie; Mrs. Tristham, his cousin and also an old friend of Mattie’s enabled that.  Now, Bernie was ‘different’, but he was never dumb. Once he realized that selling the property would leave him financially independent for life besides providing jobs and a new attraction for townsfolk, he just shrugged and accepted Mr. Dawkins’ quite generous offer. And soon after, the Happy Panda was poised for a grand opening in Bakersville.

And once it did open, Mr. Dawkins had more up his sleeve to draw people in than just the glitzy storefront, the elegant Asian-themed interiors and the offer – dubious to some- of authentic Chinese cuisine.

 He also had a panda, sometimes even a happy one.

You see, the Happy Panda had a mascot, emblazoned prominently in its logo and all its advertising – quite predictably, a giant panda. And it also had a giant panda suit, which paid-volunteers wore to anthropomorphize the mascot, and draw families in by acting all “cute and panda-like” (the brief from Dawkins) outside and around the store. In particular, versions of this live Happy Panda had been a big hit with kids in the past, and Dawkins was hoping for much the same here, because he firmly believed that happy kids brought paying families in tow.

Mind you, it wasn’t easy being inside the panda suit for long, far less attempting ‘cute’ antics in it. It was brutally heavy, fiercely hot and made breathing extremely laborious. And perhaps because the manufacturers had taken the term ‘Giant’ panda too seriously, it was crafted to proportions that for a person of average height and build wearing it meant flopping extremities and significantly restricted movement, including falling over their own ‘paws’ often. All of which was why there were few repeat takers for the panda gig. However, in its first month at Bakersville, there was still a steady trickle of first-timers willing to don the suit and be the Happy Panda. It was one of these intrepid volunteers that Bernie saw for the first time, and stopped in his tracks.

Now Bernie had never been to Disneyland or any other amusement parks. He hadn’t seen larger-than-life animal characters or mascots prance around at football games, malls or elsewhere.  Heck, he hadn’t even been to the zoo. Outside of TV and his imagination, he’d never seen an exotic wild animal, leave alone a larger-than-life version behaving human-like. And having spent his entire life in the company of their smaller, inanimate counterparts; the sight of this huge, free-spirited – albeit a bit clumsy – avatar of a furry, wild beast seemed magical. He was transfixed.

He wanted to touch that panda, he wanted to feel that panda, and when he learnt he could actually be that panda, that was all he wanted to be, right away. And Dawkins was happy to oblige, considering Bernie expected no remuneration other than the sheer joy of it and he was the only volunteer in town who seemed exactly the right size for the suit.

And when Mr. Dawkins graciously zipped Barney into the suit (once you stuffed your arms into the panda arms, it was impossible for you to reach the zip at the back) that evening, he was by the far the most energetic, enthusiastic and joyous not-real panda anyone in Bakersville had ever seen. Bernie was ebullient in this panda avatar; a complete transformation from the eternally withdrawn and quiet Bernie that the town had known. It was as if he had finally found a skin he could be comfortable in, in a way he had never been in his own; one that somehow negated his social apathy.

And his enthusiasm was infectious; it certainly rubbed off on the kids, who queued up every evening to be picked up in those big panda arms, to dance a nonsensical dance with him, or to just ride him. And the adults cheered him on with high-fives and the occasional, “Go, Panda-man!” It was all very merry, and as happy as Bernie with this set-up was Mr. Dawkins, given all the attention his restaurant was getting. For as long as it lasted, that is.

See, while Bernie was a huge hit as a walking-talking panda, the same wasn’t true for the restaurant. While people did flock to it in the first few months, its novelty value ran out pretty soon. Bakersville really didn’t have a very eclectic palate. By its seventh month, the Happy Panda was catering only to a few weekend takeaway orders and the odd evening tipplers. And this despite the fact that Bernie still had decent sized crowds interacting with his panda-self; they just chose to interact outside the restaurant and then walk on by. So, it was really no surprise to the town when shortly after its first year, the Happy Panda closed its doors. Beyond the handful of people who lost their jobs, nobody missed it; least of all Bernie, who was allowed to keep the panda suit as a parting gift, and really, that’s all he cared about.

In fact, Bernie had grown into the suit so much that long after the Happy Panda itself was a distant memory, people still saw the panda around town every evening; interacting with the kids, who still loved it. The Panda-Bernie, too, seemed as attached to the kids now as Regular-Bernie was to his stuffed toys.

Earlier, when the restaurant was still around, people remembered seeing Bernie out of the suit sometimes; buying stuff for the house or walking to and from the restaurant before and after his evening panda gig. But now, all they ever saw of him was in the suit. Which sort of begged the question: who was zipping him in and out of the suit now? I think perhaps no one was; because I think he had stopped taking it off at all. Six months after the Happy Panda shut; Bernie relieved Mrs. Hobbins of her duties as occasional housekeeper, but not before she had mentioned to people how she always found Bernie wearing the suit at home now and how she found strands of synthetic fur on the bed, suggesting he probably slept in it as well. Truth be told, she was probably relieved to be let go of; vacuuming the house while a giant panda sat cross-legged on the sofa, watching cartoons on TV, was rather unsettling for her.

But while some of us had started wondering aloud if Bernie was actually living inside that suit, before anyone could ask him, the incident happened.

It happened on a Sunday, a day five-year-old Molly Chambers enjoyed the most; because on Sundays her parents always took her to the Town Park and they had a long, lazy picnic lunch there. She could chase the birds and the squirrels or just roll around the grass, while Mom usually read a book and her Dad just lazed; both keeping an eye on her though. That’s how it was usually, but today she wasn’t happy. Because Mom and Dad were fighting over something – rather loudly – and she hated it when they fought. That’s when she saw something that lifted her flagging spirits; something large and friendly, right across Main Street, on the curb outside the closed Chinese restaurant whose food she never liked. It was the panda. She waved at it happily and it waved right back. She looked back at her Mom and Dad, saw they were still engrossed in a slanging match and took off on a mad dash across the street to meet the panda. Some of us other adults also lounging in the Park noticed, but by the time we reacted, she was half-way across, too far for us to reach in time. But the panda was already moving; faster than I’ve ever seen anything that big move, despite the limp.

When the light turned green at the traffic intersection before Main Street, Grady Wilkinson (still sharp, but now a diligent Manager at the local Bank) gunned his newly acquired Chevrolet. It was a Sunday, and the street was empty of traffic, with just a handful of folks populating the Park alongside. Mentally, he was already home, digging into his mother’s Sunday roast. Then suddenly, he heard people screaming, and a tiny bundle in a yellow polka-dotted dress appeared in front of his car, and then froze. By the time he slammed on the brakes, he realized it was little Molly Chambers, but he also realized he was going to hit her, brakes or no brakes. That’s when something big, black and white, and furry appeared between the car and the child. The panda flung Molly out of the way just seconds before the car ran into him; launching him across the street on to the curb, where he landed with a soft thud and bounced twice before rolling into a little side-alley - that once housed the service-entry to the Happy Panda – and disappearing from the stunned spectators’ sights.

The little girl lay at the side of the street, still in a state of shock, but unhurt barring bruises on her knees and elbows. Grady, visibly ashen and still-shaking, made sure she wasn’t seriously injured before leaving her in the arms of her parents and rushing to check on Bernie. Some of us followed, fearing the worst.

That’s when things got really weird.

The panda lay sprawled on its back, unmoving, just inside the otherwise barren alley, which ended in an impassable dead-end. Its head was twisted at an impossible angle. When we were turning it around to unzip the suit, it felt surprisingly light…and squishy. It took us a while to pull the zip down; its links were rusted and it seemed jammed, as if it hadn’t been used in a long time. When we eventually did, the suit was empty, except for the ripe reek of having been lived in incessantly; the mingled odor of sweat, urine, excrement and something else, vaguely human. But there was no blood on the suit or any tell-tale evidence of anyone having worn it through an accident. And even if by some fantastical act of escapology, Bernie had managed to unzip the suit himself, crawl out of it and then zip it again, he had to still be in the alley, injured or otherwise. But all that lay there was the impossibly vacant suit. Expectedly, a search behind and around the alley proved futile.

At some point, the police were involved, and at some point they broke into his locked house. Apparently, most parts of it were cloaked in layers of dust and disuse. The living-room, the kitchen, the bathroom; all seemed like they hadn’t been used in days, maybe weeks. And stray hairs from the synthetic panda fur were everywhere; the carpet, the stairs, on the bedroom floor, and, of course, on the bed itself. Except that wasn’t all there was on the bed.  Bernie was on it too, in nothing but his underpants; drained of color, stiff as a board, with pasty skin that hadn’t seen the sun in a long time, and lips frozen in a strangely gentle smile.

The Doctor said he’d been dead anywhere between two to three days; certainly much earlier than that afternoon, when a fake panda saved a little girl.  He died of a massive heart attack – not uncommon in people his size, the doctor said – quite likely in his sleep.  The doctor had no opinions on how he may have gotten out of the panda suit on his own, or how the panda suit had then walked halfway across town. Whatever opinions the police may have had, they just released a statement saying that Bernie had died of natural causes and had probably ‘discarded’ the suit outside the house previously, whereupon an unidentified person had worn it temporarily. They refused to speculate on said person’s ‘disappearance’ after the accident, or on how he limped and filled that over-sized suit exactly like Bernie; suggesting that those of us on scene may have overlooked some details in our obvious distress. And that’s how the case was closed, quite unremarkably.

Since no family showed up, some of us townsfolk had him buried in the local cemetery; we put most of his favorite toys in there with him. Interestingly, later that day, the panda suit disappeared from the police evidence locker. No one had any clue how, no one spoke about it much either. The police because they were embarrassed about its ‘theft’ and some of us, well, maybe we had different ideas that we didn’t like to talk about.

Maybe we thought that Bernie had grown into his second-skin so completely that even in dying he had left an essential part of himself in it, enough to save a little girl, and do a bit more. And maybe he’s wearing it even now, in a world not very different from the one in his imagination; where animals speak and everyone’s always happy being whoever they want to be.

THE END