The Bee Keeper's Fever Dream

Devan Sagliani

January 2006

Baghdad.

Hawthorne.

These thoughts are normal I am told.

The important thing is that we do not repeat them in the company of others.

The important thing is that we do not allow them to inhibit our ability to perform.

The important thing is that I was building a very impressive stock portfolio at the time, diversified like hell, municipals and all.

My world was filled with purpose because it was utilitarian and clean.

My marriage didn’t begin falling apart when my wife's mother began falling apart. It just accelerated.

My marriage at that time was like a suicidal driver on wet asphalt during a hail storm, briefcase open and pouring documents out into the cold void through the back windows, tie undone and hung around the rearview mirror, empty bottle stained amber rolling around in the vacant passenger seat.

Yeah. I’ll admit it. I’ve thought about suicide before, but name one sane person who hasn’t.

Potassium chloride and iodine.

These were just two of the ingredients they used to clean up her wound when she fell, a jagged cut on her thigh that sweltered into a violent bruise.

We rushed over the minute we got the phone call.

We lived so close that it took less than ten minutes.

We discussed whether or not we should move her as she laid moaning on the nicotine yellow linoleum.

I took the bottle and pensively dabbed a cotton swab until it fizzed.

I applied it gingerly to her skin and Doris cried.

My wife was transfixed as she watched. Her personal identity began to disintegrate.

Find a myth to live through; these were the words that my wife had written onto her psyche by her junior year Chaucer professor. These were the words that kept her anchored to this sultry world, a linguistic tether of irrational yarn.

My myth was always control.

My myth was always force coupled with predestination.

My myth was tainted by the desire for a return to some forgotten and distant paradise lost.

The soul of the world is the Garden of Eden.

It lives in the womb.

I was ejected from this perfect world once, forced through the gates and blocked by an angel with a fiery sword.

I have always known what my own personal myth was.

This is not true for everyone. I can admit that.

For my wife her myth was always about somehow evolving into some other version of her own mother.

We should have had children, I thought, as I was throwing away the remnants of our failed dinner.

That is where we went wrong.

Our neighbors, the Childers, who utilized the probate of one of their deceased parents estate to fund their transfer out of Grand Rapids Michigan to the Whisper Oaks town home Community of San Pedro, told us they had bred within the first year of their marriage. Greg Childers laughed when I suggested that I still utilized prophylactics during certain parts of the month for 'security reasons'.

They had planned things out a bit further than we had.

After the second Childers offspring had coursed through the gates of paradise and ventured out into the world Greg had a vasectomy to prevent any further surprises.

"It's a simple procedure," he explained. "They go in and snip the tubes, then tie them in a bow.

They say that if I want, they can reconnect them. I told them I didn't see the need."

They were full of surprises, the Childers, while we had grown as predictable as a head of cabbage. I used to watch them barbeque seafood in their backyard from my home office window upstairs, a succinct vantage point. This was after my wife had insisted that I choose the work-from-home option three days a week so that she could go back to school and we could still have someone on call for her mother.

"In case of emergency," that’s what she said.

This was after her return to remedial course studies, after her coloring books for test preparation began to litter every surface of our home.

Drone eviction occurs when a colony stops feeding its drones due to a lack of incoming pollen supplies.

I spent untold hours in the quiet sanctity of my pseudo-office, stripped of my power, withering.

Over a number of days drones become weakened and are forcibly removed from the hive.

I stopped watching the Childers when I felt I needed to watch, when it became a necessity to feel like I existed in a social sense.

I used to look at my wife and feel like my heart was swelling until it was too much for me, until it hurt to be so in love with someone else.

The most important factor in a hive colony is the amount of fresh pollen being collected.

I used to look at her without fear or distrust.

I don’t know how I am ever going to feel that way again.

I felt like I had lost my religion. I was no longer within yelling distance of my unctuous human machine, my pacifying uniformity.

If pollen supplies coming into the colony are terminated, then drones are evicted.

The soil beneath my feet was eroding and pulling me down into its musty umber folds.

There was talk when I did go in to DataCorp, whispers that dogged near my ankles as I passed, an obvious coup developing.

I might as well have worn a yellow sunflower dress to work.

James was extra nice to me and I knew it was a bad sign, like a funeral home director planning a burial.

‘The old guy is losing it,’ that’s what their eyes said as I passed their cubicles. Nervous giggles replaced peels of laughter at my stupid comments. I had become a stranded manatee, a figure in one of my little, blue folders, and it was all Doris’s fault.

Things were beyond great at DataCorp, then my wife’s mother, Doris Edelman, the world’s most complacent widow, started forgetting things.

Funny how the loss of her memories began to restrict the world I lived in.

You wouldn't think that the two were connected in any way.

You wouldn’t think she was the water in my ocean.

You wouldn’t understand how much I once loved my wife and how the hope of feeling that way about her again someday made me willing to do anything for her, even care for her aging mother whose memory was rapidly shrinking to the size of an unshelled garbanzo bean.

Doris would forget to shut off the oven and the house would heat to unbearable temperatures.

Doris forgot our phone number and my wife went and wrote it in thick, indelible marker on the front of her fridge. Things began to pile up on her porch, flyers and milk containers made of glass full of spoiled milk. In the living room, a precarious stack of National Enquirers and similar tabloids was growing in dangerous proportions.

She was cleaning.

She fell again.

She didn’t know who to call.

She couldn’t remember.

She bled a lot.

Things like that were happening all the time.

Doris lived in the same house for forty years. It was the house that her and her husband Herbert bought shortly after they were married. It was the house that my wife had been raised in and her childhood bedroom had remained intact, even after she left for college. She never resumed residence there once she dropped out of school.

It was a time capsule of a young girl’s life complete in every detail, like the set of a movie of the week. It was where they held the wake for her father after the accident at the construction site.

One morning, Doris left the house and vanished.

We searched frantically for her. There was no sign of where she might have wandered off to, no trail of breadcrumbs to follow to find her way back home.

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