The Bee Keeper's Fever Dream
Devan Sagliani
January 2006
January 2006
I gave him the orders and he dispersed them.
He was exceedingly motivated.
He was efficient.
He was loyal.
We were the model that the others looked up to in the hive.
He would come to me later with piles of sheets he had sorted through, figures and numbers, neatly organized, and inserted into blue folders suggesting finality.
His team looked up to him and I never belittled him in front of them. Any complaints or suggestions I had about his work I gave him in private.
I wanted them to fear him.
I wanted him to command their respect.
I wanted them to admire him and work harder to attempt to displace my favoritism for him.
I gave him lavish bonuses and praise in front of our team.
He responded well to positive motivation.
He brought back the blue folders with surprising speed and consistency, fulfilling my seemingly endless and non sequitur requests with blind faith, like a cult member.
The contents of the blue folders ranged from statistics of unwed teenage mothers in American cities to manatee stranding incidents in Texas since the turn of the century. There were charts whose color coding suggested the spread of teenage abuse of angel dust in Washington D.C. had grown significantly in contrast to the number of re-released Sinatra albums sold citywide. There were thermonuclear scans of the atmosphere over the continent of Africa included in a folder where data on Ebola outbreaks in Gabon were juxtaposed against smallpox incidents from a century ago.
My wife was never interested in what I did at work. She seemed to view matters of commerce as corrupt and dirty. She acted as if discussing my work would somehow contaminate her. She never really understood what it all meant to me, to be good at this thing that only a few others could even recognize. I had to come to terms with that eventually and it broke my heart, but I loved her.
Shouldn’t that have been enough?
At the end of the week Bob would reconvene with us in the main conference hall on the third floor and stand near the projector, going over the list of culled projects we had presented. We would report our progress, discuss our failures, and leave early, around three in the afternoon, to lighten the daily commute.
A brave new world indeed, and just a double click away.
I was the master of a very small, purposeful world, still and calm.
I never knew how DataCorp translated our findings into the one hundred and ten thousand dollar salary they gave me with full medical and dental and a 401K, and, most days, I didn't care.
At least I used to not care, when things were going so well.
In the first year of my marriage a pack of impish devils began to needle me in the form of an unrelenting curiosity that trellised into interlacing streams of suspicion and threatened to undermine all I had worked for. This unquenchable rumination arose in me around the same time my marriage began to grow queer.
With success came contentment and eventually a slow decay.
My golf scores were down.
My sex life had grown regular and stagnant.
Even our fights had become predictable. I could weather them with as little interaction as possible, allowing her to rant like an opium addict in the throes of a discontent fever dream.
I lost interest in the running stock quotes at the bottom of my twenty-two inch monitor.
I began to doubt.
I began to entertain preposterous notions.
These were not unfounded notions, mind you, like a hypochondriac with a sore throat in allergy season envisioning the end of his frail existence from some newly manufactured virus.
I was beyond centered.
They were based on concrete incidents.
There were notes in Arabic in the wastebasket of Bob Cleary's office for weeks.
There was an incident at the hive, a foreigner, an outsider, visited our wing of the office, as if he had wandered lost into the small catacombs we dwelled in, and began ranting in an indecipherable dialect of Chinese until he was ushered out by DataCorp security guards.
The incident was never properly explained to me.
I was insouciant. I rolled my acupressure balls clockwise, then counterclockwise for twenty minutes.
Ten. Fingers. Connecting. Heart.
There is something I am not telling you. There was always something underneath it all, shifting, like plate tectonics.
Listen.
I can tell you the gross figures of the number of starving children in Chechnya but I cannot tell of the republic’s true soul. I cannot tell you how the soil feels when pressed between the fingers or of the stony aftertaste of their metallic water.
Pennies and dimes.
Flat Alka Seltzer.
Aluminum.
No spreadsheet can do that for you.
I do not speak Russian.
I do not speak Chinese.
I told my subordinates that it was nothing to be concerned with, just a crazy man in a thousand dollar designer suit, and to return to their fact-finding missions.
There were blue folders to fill.
The world would go on.
My mind began to fabricate wild tales I dared not repeat to a soul.
I’m not that good of a writer.
There is another world beneath this one, writhing, and it began to effervesce into all the other aspects of my pristine existence. It bubbled into the soft gray matter inside my mother-in-law's head. That’s when the fighting in my marriage really began.
Aluminum cans.
Stem cells.
The future.
The forgetting.
It’s all connected somehow.
That’s my job, to find the thing that connects all of these elements, that unlocks new meaning in them.
That is what I do best in the world.
I would envision clandestine meetings deep within the walls of DataCorp with Iranian businessmen, discussing the Uranium contents of the hills of Jalalabad in quick, hushed tones.
I would dream up deep voices whispering Dari over wooden cups of dandelion wine on the other side of my office wall.
Sometimes I would imagine that our clients were wealthy, corrupt politicians from around the world.
Nygoya.
Petrozavodzk.
Nanjing.
I used to fantasize such wild things, like the numbers we fed them allowed them to commit unspeakable acts of horror on an unsuspecting, civilian population.
Bosnia.
Herzegovina.
Beirut.
Sometimes I would hear echoes of the things I had filled countless blue folders to the brim with on FOX, falling lucidly out of Greta’s lacerated mouth.
Ramallah.
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