The Bee Keeper's Fever Dream
Devan Sagliani
January 2006
January 2006
An ominous, black, billowing cloud rose from the mouth of the oven. Flames shot out of the Cornish game hen, dancing eerily across its charred flesh, like some sort of alien code to an unseen enemy or an indiscernible and inimical lesbian feminist argument, laughing at me, taunting and emasculating me.
Wait a minute. Let me start over.
I suck as this almost as much as I suck at cooking.
It’s hard to believe that I actually spent time in a creative writing class once, years ago in college. I needed an elective and there were several cute girls in the class.
Don’t get me wrong.
I understand why you are making me do this.
I understand that this is an important part of marriage counseling.
I understand why you want me to write down everything, how it will help the healing process between my wife and I, but I still feel silly.
I’m not a great writer.
I never have been.
It doesn’t bother me in the slightest, making this confession.
I have other talents, like shifting data around and sorting it and pulling out meaning where none seems to exist.
Patterns in the data flow reveal anomalies.
Patterns in the data flow reveal irregularities.
Patterns in the data flow reveal unforeseen connections, concentric circles of interlocking statistical relevance, transparently laid one over the next like a translucent golden stairway to Heaven, winding up into the clouds like a double helix.
I use those patterns to create meaning in a chaotic world that by design defies order and classification.
I use those patterns to make money, which is the life source of this world.
I use them to create value from an excremental culture of waste, to breath new life into this dying planet like a tiny spark, like the glimmer of hope that was left in Pandora’s mythological box after all the other evil things had already escaped and contaminated the world.
I also use them to fill mass graves with nameless bodies, filthy and unlicensed, completely forgettable, in dull, crowded cities of dirt and pain my eyes will never see.
In my dreams they have neither faces nor sex.
In my dreams they pour from the earth towards the sky, wrapped in flames and redeemed; clods of silt form a gauzy veil that streams behind them like a bride on her wedding day as their newly awakened screams invoke in my temples a low, visceral throb.
I know what I am now, how complicit I am, but that doesn’t deter my fascination for my job or my raw need to perform it. Capability always supercedes culpability as the arbiter of our fate.
Knowledge is neither good nor evil, neither power nor freedom. It is beyond good and evil. It is the tool we use to harness the pure energies of this existence and manipulate them to our advantage.
Ask yourself this: what good is a moral compass when the signified value of an implied true North has been obliterated? Or, to be more precise, how can one live a moral life in this society when the engine of hypercapitalism requires the obliteration of limiting terms such as ‘objective standards?'
I am not the only one whose work is both destructive and necessary, positive and negative, according to who is interpreting it; although I no longer require the blessing of an obsolete God and the religious sanctioning of my daily activities to support the value and ultimate meaning of my life.
I have come to a place in my life where I am ready to be held accountable, ready to defend my choices. I’m okay with that.
This really isn’t about my marriage.
I use those patterns to make other patterns, like searching through trash for something to recycle, like digging through the decaying stench of a warm, eroding mulch pile, in past your elbows with both hands, but in a much more complicated and sanitized way.
This is about control.
I swim through a technological dump full of random scraps of discarded info flow, statistics once compiled to serve other masters and means, and redefine them, endowing them with new equity by filtering them into new protocol categories.
There is no simpler way to explain it. Sometimes I wish there was.
It is like suddenly remembering a dead language from some distant future and knowing that you speak it fluently but no one else does. You will have to teach others how to conjugate in data flow before you can communicate with them.
Past.
Present.
Future-tense.
It is like having nostalgia for the present.
Maybe this is about my marriage, about what went wrong there, why I started coming to see you in the first place.
It is like awaking from a coma into a world that only you can remember, which makes it not entirely dissimilar to having your heart broken, or some of the emotional cycles that mercurially govern the mind post-infidelity.
When it comes to crunching info and making charts out of seemingly unconnected data and easy access spread sheets I have an uncanny predilection.
You might even call it a gift.
I know that this is not the reason why I started therapy, but I want to put my best foot forward.
This journal stuff shouldn’t have to feel like a weekly homework assignment. I shouldn’t have to feel like I am being forced to do something by someone who I am paying to help me get better.
I have to want to share my feelings with you.
I can’t let you help me any other way.
I’m only doing this because I want to believe that there is still a chance that I can fix my shattered marriage.
You told me to start with the incident, the thing that fractured my trust in our relationship, but that’s hard to pinpoint. A million things could be responsible for what happened, how we ended up here.
Work.
Sex.
Impatience.
I’ve never been so uncertain about anything before in my life. I can tell you without hesitation that I don’t like it. It feels like being suffocated while you watch the final seconds of your life tick by on a large clock, all that time, misspent, thrashing about, hoping to escape and take one long good breath.
I think the best place to start is the night I found out that my wife had cheated on me.
That’s as good a place as any, or don’t you agree?
You said to go back to the event that still carried the strongest emotions in my memories, and that event carries some pretty strong emotions.
You said to talk about my feelings.
You told me to visualize what things were like at that point in the marriage, to put myself back in that place and time, to experience it all over again. That way, you insisted, I could search for clues as to what had happened that might have contributed to the infidelity, as if my marriage up to that point was some dime-store mystery that I would eventually unravel through deductive reason.
Control is very important to me. It always has been. When I feel like I am not in control I start to lose perspective in my life; I become unbalanced, as if I am fading away into nothingness.
It’s one of my greatest fears, anonymity.
I know why all those serial killers end up confessing.
I’ll do it again.
I’ll tell you how it started.
I hope I am not boring you with too many details, but this is the only way that I feel comfortable sharing this kind of thing with you, with anyone. I have to make it a story, like it’s happening to someone else, otherwise I’ll quit before I even start.
I warned you, I’m not a great writer.
Inky black plumes of soot rose from the gaping mouth of the oven as my carefully prepared Cornish game hen, stuffed with fruit and precooked brown rice then doused with butter, sprouted a bright orange mane of flames, out of the weathered bands of an Indian ink tribal tattoo, where once its tender skin had succulently sizzled a mere thirty minutes before.
That’s better. I like that.
That’s much more colorful and visually impressive.
That’s what I get for setting the oven to 450° instead of 350°.
‘The soul of the world is broken,’ I thought.
‘We have forgotten our true nature, that we were once like Gods or other immortals.’
I might have spoken it out loud with a sense of ironic detachment.
‘Buried deep within the crevices of the original earth, hidden from our soft, dull eyes, is a lost world humans crawled out of four hundred million years ago and abandoned, opening and closing like an oyster shell, empty and forgotten.’
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