The Bee Keeper's Fever Dream

Devan Sagliani

January 2006

My wife was hysterical to the point of being nearly useless.

We found Doris downtown near the strip malls, huddled into a pile of used cardboard, shivering.

She had been there for hours.

She had gone looking for a store that no longer existed and had given up trying to find her way back across a foreign landscape that she no longer recognized.

She had gone looking for an America that you could only find on late night reruns, an America full of God fearing couples raising children with strong family values.

I used to bury my face in my wife’s lap when I would come home from work and smell her while she rubbed my shoulders. With my eyes closed she would softly hum to me like a soothsayer, a delicate collection of sounds that eased away all the tension, like forgetting.

She didn't remember where she lived.

We took her back to her house but it was never the same.

We started making plans for her move the minute we put her to bed.

I saw a fear in my wife’s eyes that day I had never dreamed I would see. We couldn’t leave Doris alone for a second. My wife was there to meet her when she awoke in the morning.

We started mentally packing up the house the minute we put her to bed.

I used to think that my marriage would last forever, that it wouldn’t be like other marriages, that I was capable of saving it from becoming typical.

We took Doris home but she didn't really live there anymore and we both knew it.

We transplanted Doris to a care facility, but that’s not what we called it.

I used to think that if I cared enough, if I showed my concern and said pleasant things to my wife, reminded her of my love for her, that I would never end up having to keep a therapy journal.

We told Doris that we were painting the house.

We told her that the fumes would be really strong for a few days and that she wouldn’t be able to stay in the house during that time.

We told her that the move was temporary, that soon she would be back in her house all shiny and brand new like the day she first walked through the front door, a young bride with a wild and romantic heart and faith in the future.

I used to believe that I was unique. More than anything I want to feel like I felt the first time we kissed, like I felt the day we were married, like I felt on our honeymoon.

There was no fear or mistrust between us then.

I want to go back to that place.

I want to wipe the slate clean and start over.

I want to return to the Garden and forget again.

Doris was disintegrating along with my marriage. My wife spent nights up crying inconsolably for hours over it.

She stopped asking when she could go home by the end of the first month.

She stopped recognizing me when I came to check on her.

No one from work bothered laughing at my jokes anymore. It was clear that James was going to assume my position within the company, that he would be enjoying my Starbucks on Monday mornings during the great speech.

I want to not have to be in control for a while, to let it all go, to be taken by the hand and led home.

I want a soft and friendly place to forget all of this.

I really want therapy to work. That is why I am telling you this.

She stopped being connected to reality. She was unplugged from the world, from time, free to escape into any version of herself she deemed worthy to entertain.

I tried to explain what was happening to her but she showed no interest. It was as if the words held no value, like they signified nothing, like I was speaking gibberish.

She never went home again.

She never knew the difference.

By the second month she had started calling me Frank instead of Jim.

Frank was the name of her butcher who had choked to death on a piece of sausage.

Frank was also the name of the forty-year-old divorced man, who moved into her house with his three cats.

Frank paid us a modest sum that allowed us to keep Doris in Shadow Grove comfortably.

I just want to feel loved and safe in this world, but I know now that it just isn’t possible to feel that way again.

Life is less imaginative than one might think.

So much of the world is just facts and figures, pressures and fissuring.

I know that better than anyone.

So much of the future becomes clear given the right amount of information. That's what I do for a living. I prove that if we have all the information in front of us we can predict the future. We can show conclusively that it is not a gushing paroxysm, violently usurping our destiny, but an opaque river, transforming us.

There are days I would like to drown Doris and her daughter Francine both in that river.

There are days I do not know who or what I am anymore.

There are days I just don’t feel like I can go on anymore.

The world is spinning so fast, spinning and spinning, and there is nothing we can do to slow it down.

I just want this to all end well but I don’t think it’s going to.

Less than a week after her mother’s move to the community, my wife began her silent campaign to undermine my manhood.

I don’t think I will ever feel totally safe again.

I don’t know that it’s possible to feel that way in this world.

We were in bed, post coitus, when she first unearthed her mounting discontent. The words came out like a snake slithering, a wheezy near whisper that wriggled serpentine into the fragile and contingent space between our still entwined bodies. Still the suggestion from my wife's lips was absolutely lucid.

"Maybe I should get a job again."

I tried to pretend I hadn't heard her at first.

I tried to pretend that the force of the semen exploding out of my urethra had somehow dislodged tiny bones in my ears, a tympanic calamity, temporarily making it impossible for me to translate the audible wavelengths of sound she had emitted into coherent words.

I tried to blithely smile.

This tactic, however, was not entirely successful.

"Did you hear me?"

This was harder to ignore. Avoiding positing a response on this one meant risking being taken for either arrogant or ignorant. At some point I was going to have to deal with it. I exhaled a long, deliberate sigh.

"Why?"

"I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my mother. Her situation bothers me."

My wife has the most beautiful and mesmerizing eyes, like black shiny coal and burnt amber with flecks of liquid gold. I’ve always thought she was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life. No matter what we’ve been through I never lost sight of that.

I feigned understanding, hoping that a sudden influx of estrogen had caused this lapse of logic, and that empathetic behavior would bring her back around.

"It bothers me too, sweetie," I said, sitting up and facing her with my best facial expressions ready to call into action, like index cards. I cued up the non-diegetic soundtrack music in my mind. I tried to recall the blocking for the scene.

None of it was real to me. It was just another drama unfolding.

I believe I was wearing my face of compassion, screwed on with a hint of intrigue.

‘Let's see how she takes this one,’ that’s what I thought.

"No listen, when I was in college I had other aspirations. I never even thought of marriage before I met you. I was considering a career in law, originally. After graduation I kind of got lost in the world, then we met, and now all I do is read books on feng shui."

In college my wife had studied comparative literature. She had taken a number of rather interesting and pointless classes on the anthropology of unknown and now extinct cultures. She abandoned them shortly after our engagement and began focusing on her wedding plans. Prior to that evening, I had never heard of this interest in law.

I knew I was in for a long haul. I went soft on her.

"You're good at feng shui."

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