Free The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer

of it slap against his palm. He knew that his pants leg had been stained with the yellow-green of the grasses of the plains. His face had felt the breath of the place upon it. Jeez Louise, he'd smelled the fucking dirt, for chrissakes! No dream had ever been so real, so true, and sometimes even when he woke to the warm body of a woman in his bed, he wished he was still in dream. Sometimes, too, when he woke, Bolger remembered Crake's firm handshake and wondered if it had been a kind of trigger.
    Bolger told none of this to Crake. All Crake got were the standard progress reports Bolger gave him over the phone. For reasons Bolger couldn't put into words, he didn't want to visit Crake's house again if he could help it. Maybe because it reminded him too much of his old man's place, and getting the shit kicked out of him every other week.
    Bolger would open the bed stand drawer and take out the gun given to him by his father, and an old color photo of his mother standing on a bridge in Prague.
    Then he would call Crake.

    "Yeah, Crake? I went to the post office. I asked the stupid questions you didn't have the balls to ask. They've never heard of Sonoria. It's not in their computers. You can't send a package there. I mean, you could try - you could address something to Bumfuck, Sonoria, and see if it came back - but it's not in the computers. And, listen, they don't have anything close to it, either. No `Slonoria,' `Shonoria,' `Snoria,' or whatever. Sonora's a fucking desert, not a country, just a county, with no `i.' So much for misspellings. Over and out."

    Crake didn't know why Bolger said "over and out," and Bolger never told him it was left over from a brief stint driving a truck for his dad. Mostly they'd hauled timber out of Canada, and it had been the most boring work Bolger had ever done. Getting out of it had also meant getting the fuck away from his dad, so he'd split. But he still liked that phrase, "over and out." It had a way of shutting up whoever was on the other end.
    Crake appreciated "over and out," because he'd been about to make a big mistake. If Bolger hadn't cut him off, Crake would've blurted out, "But I know it's real! I've been there. I've walked along the riverbank. I've run through the plains. I've walked toward the mountains."
    Crake, in his house by himself, no longer got any satisfaction from his stamps. Instead, he thought about Sonoria a lot, and Bolger. He wondered what Bolger's life must be like, solving mysteries for a living. As a surveyor, he'd spent a lot of time outside, measuring - a lot of time in the spring and summer hammering little stakes with red flags into the ground so people could sell properties or rezone them. This seemed so far from Bolger's experience of life. And yet now their worlds were the same world, all because of a stamp.
    Bolger, meanwhile, kept looking, needing that fifty dollars a day, dutifully mailed to him by Crake in six-day increments. Bolger didn't know why Crake insisted on six-day increments, and it pissed him off because it seemed arbitrary and yet organized. Crake did it because he had a thing about threes, and because it fit the increments in which he'd buried the stolen money, but Bolger never figured that out.
    The Internet and the library came next on Bolger's list, simultaneously because he no longer had a computer. In a particle-board stall at the library, he found out that "Sonora" was also a music company, a snake, and a kind of thunderstorm in California. "Sonoria" was nothing. Wondering, in a purely theoretical way, if a piece of information had fallen through the cracks, he spent hours huddled over remaining archives of decaying microfiche, focusing on obscure newspapers and old travel magazines. Maybe it had been a place, a long time ago. Over time, Bolger's vivid dreams of the place had begun to infiltrate his days. He had them idling in the car at a stop light, in line at the mini-mart to buy some beer. But the closer he got, the farther away