The Bee Keeper's Fever Dream

Devan Sagliani

January 2006

I lit a Newport and walked into the living room, flipping on the Reformation Symphony by Mendelssohn to calm my nerves.

Things felt wrong.

We were off the charted territory on the map and I knew it.

Things in my marriage had been sliding for quite some time.

No one was trying to deny that.

No one was trying to do anything to fix it either.

Things just kept getting more and more confusing, and I wasn’t always sure how I felt about what was happening. The more I tried to sort out my feelings the less solid the ground beneath my feet seemed to be. It was as if the soil I once took for granted kept eroding away, like I was falling into a sinkhole, back into that original earth upon which we built this faulty paradise, one layer and a time.

I hadn’t smoked since high school.

I hadn’t smoked since my mother died of lung cancer.

I picked the habit back up when we started fighting.

It was almost like I never stopped in the first place, like twenty years hadn’t passed. Once the initial nausea and queasiness subsided, the nicotine rush and buzz settled in; it was like I had never quit. It was like being locked in a room with a friendly and consoling executioner, the warm gun nestled visibly in his lap, as if he wasn’t even trying to hide the unpleasantness of what it represented, as I listened to him comfort me about the eventuality of my demise.

Things were complicated, that is all that I am saying.

Things weren't always like this.

Things started slowly, gradually, and built up speed.

The first year of my marriage everything was perfect.

The first year of my marriage my wife did all of the cooking.

The first year of my marriage my mother in law grew soft in the head and had to be displaced from her world, had to be set up in a retirement community saccharinely dubbed Shadow Grove.

I hope I never end up in one of those homes.

I’d rather put a gun in my mouth than go gently into that good night.

The first year of my marriage I was free to focus on more worldly pursuits, the burgeoning aspects of commerce that define a man, packaging and repackaging information for sale at DataCorp.

It was a world that I had been destined for since birth.

It was a world full of order, a world that ran on schedule. We nicknamed the office ‘the hive’ because of the lay out of the cubicles.

There were clearly marked boundaries for everything.

There were hard and fast rules to follow, operating procedures and manuals.

There were margins to exist within, defined signs with easily decoded meanings.

I spent days assiduously pouring over spread sheets full of discarded info dump.

The days at DataCorp clicked away with the precision of a well-manufactured clock. Each one could be accounted for by the minute. The tiny details of the machine working, breathing life and feeding analysis of the data out to us, were like a miniature symphony to the trained eye.

Mondays were spent in protracted productivity meetings with my supervisor, Bob Cleary from the Upper Management team, and three other midlevel advisors, Larry Trancas, Tom Sinclair and Fizel Lieberman.

Each of us was in charge of our own team.

Each of us controlled a wing of the hive, a fat section of DataCorp’s precious honeycomb.

Each of us put on our best Pollyanna impersonation, trying to laugh more genuinely at the wry innuendos buried in Bob’s weekly monologue until we practically descended into a pack of cackling hyenas, although he never seemed to notice.

Bob enjoyed the clamoring and endless fawning.

Bob rewarded those who were humble enough to truckle before him, in the same way all great leaders throughout history have enjoyed basking in appropriately tasteful compliments from the honey-tongued mouths of well-trained sycophants.

Bob would begin the Monday meeting with a cup of Starbucks for each of us.

Bob would launch the Monday meeting off with a gratuitous soliloquy regarding the previous weeks accomplishments that made us all feel included. It was pretty much the only time you could expect to receive praise from him, or recognition, or acknowledgement. The rest of the week his office door was usually closed barring emergency sessions.

At DataCorp you always knew exactly what your place in the world was.

We would always start exactly on time, without fail.

We would go as long as was necessary, until each team member present had utilized the opportunity presented to them to offer positive suggestions.

Bob’s little Monday meeting speech always started with him commending us on efficiency, extolling the virtues of employee appreciation as the cornerstone of a productive and enlightened society, and urging us not to stray from the course.

Bob wore a navy blue tweed vest on Mondays instead of a suit jacket, as if he was ready to roll up his sleeves and dig into the work himself, ready to tarnish his fresh manicure by tunneling into manure with the rest of the ‘plebians’ in search of lost gems.

Bob liked to present himself as a man of action.

He was inspiring in a lot of ways, like a mentor more than a father figure, and I think he left an indelible impression on me about what is possible professionally.

I don’t know that I would say that I looked up to him, but I used to move my lips to the key phrases of the speech.

It was a world so uniform that nothing was ever out of place.

This is about my marriage, but not in the way that you think it would be.

It was a world that you could depend on.

While outside the storms of change incited chaos and fear and disharmony, our perfect world never faltered. It never failed to achieve its maximum potential.

My marriage was disintegrating in direct proportion to my career growth. You could have plotted it on a chart.

It was the equivalent of a drone hive at peak output during honey season.

I felt so at home.

I wish I could feel that safe again, like being in a womb that would not fail or eject you.

Isn’t that what you shrinks think all of us men want anyway?

Whenever we would fight I would assuage my fears with more work. Instead of talking about my feelings I would burrow into a new project until I was so far ahead of the rest of the hive I had to propose new parameters to keep busy.

I have never been as successful as I was when I was emotionally distraught.

I have never been so happy as when I was miserable.

Bob would finish his speech then ask each of us in turn to describe our teams progress and suggest some new strategies for the week to come. There were charts passed around with brightly colored bar graphs and pie shapes, spreadsheets on various categories, innumerable white sheets with highlighted sections that amounted to little or nothing.

It was better than religion for me.

Opiates failed to compare and Marx became a babbling derelict before this kind of unfaltering certainty.

It was customized in a way that neither Christ nor Buddha could ever be.

Religion was scurrilous. This was sublime.

We were nestled into our own false sense of security.

We were the gleaming hope of the new world order, an effulgent paragon of possibility.

We were pioneering a bold new fascism.

Everything was well marked and labeled.

We would end the meetings with a resolution to improve, the Western notion of progress and high quantities of caffeine humming as loud and pure in our veins as Bob’s sonorous voice had just moments before.

My wife and I would fight so long I couldn’t remember what had started us fighting in the first place. I guess that’s pretty normal.

Bob’s honeyed tones were like an aria that drained torpidly out of the air and settled over our skin, his optimism sinking into us via osmosis.

My wife, by contrast, would scream so loud when she got upset that I felt skinned alive in her rage, excoriated by the litany of irrelevant and caustic insults, until the wind inside of her would just dry up and leave her silent.

Things weren’t really that bad the first year of our marriage.

I had a research team of six underneath me, headed by James Tralmer, a bright young graduate from Rutgers University with an MBA in something I could never recall. It was James I talked to the rest of the week.

One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight