The Bee Keeper's Fever Dream

Devan Sagliani

January 2006

"But I might be good at a number of other things that I don't know about. Listen, I got to thinking about my mother being locked up in that home and it just filled me with a sense of emptiness. My mother never did anything with herself. She was never anything more than a housewife and then she was a widow. Do you know how proud she was when I finished college?"

"I thought you said she was against the idea of you going to school," I gently countered.

"She was, up until I finished. We were sitting near a patch of begonias in the backyard and she turned to me, her face was glowing. Do you know what she said to me?"

I had a feeling I was going to hear it again anyway.

I flipped up the next index card, an expression of beguiled confusion, as if to say, tell me, came up.

"She said that she had never been so proud in her entire life."

I had never been so bored in my life.

I was losing my ability to feign interest.

I began to wish I was at work, flipping through Playboy and hearing my printer hum.

I knew what was happening but I just didn’t know how to deal with it.

More than anything I still wish I could just hold my wife in my arms and feel like it is just the two of us against the world.

The seeds of disruption had sprouted within her, threatening to uproot her personal identity and our marriage with it, and I was powerless to do anything to stop it.

The numbers were starting to come back wrong.

The data was erroneous and contaminated.

The paradigm was shifting into undiscovered terra and with it a timeline and personal history were being revised, repackaged to justify another evasion, to reinvent and distract my wife for a moment, from the lack of purpose in her life.

I never told my wife what to do with her life, never attempted to control her choices or options. I left all of the choices up to her, to work or to stay home, to be in charge of her own destiny, and the strain of it unraveled her.

I just wanted her to forge her own identity, to endow her existence with some kind of self-discovered meaning, like I had.

I wanted her to be unbridled.

I wanted her to be independent.

I wanted to share my life with her in every way, to be naked and honest to the core.

The ground beneath us was undulating from the prior rhythm of our hips, from the insanity of our impulses. Suddenly, nothing was solid anymore, like plate tectonics.

I should have seen it coming, the infidelity, but I was too self-absorbed. I was too busy imagining that I was in bed with Miss September.

She could tell I was tuning her out and her voice faded away, as if something had broken in her and the force behind the words had dried up. It was nothing new.

I did not notice when she stopped talking.

That’s the truth and I know it’s ugly.

I was lying on my back making patterns in the ceilings dimly lit stucco until I fell asleep.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that night in the back of my mind, the night that must surely have been the beginning of this. The Reform Symphony had run out, I had smoked most of the pack, and all I was left with were the smells of the house, the smoke and spices and burnt fruit smoldering in the kitchen unattended.

Why do all the important things in life have to be so complicated?

I would give anything if I could go back to being a child again, living in a small world that all made sense, that I knew the boundaries of, where everything was patched up at the end of the day or was someone else’s problem and I could sleep with a clean conscience and wake up feeling renewed and ready to rush out into the world again.

I would give anything to feel that degree of confidence and safety again, but I know that I never will.

The world is the world is a word.

By the time she came home the wall clock read eleven thirty, the microwave clock said eleven-thirty-two and the wristwatch I had left on the bathroom counter was reading only ten-fifty-eight, a perfunctory fabrication I had taught myself to believe to get to occasions such as office meetings and scheduled dinners on time.

The clocks in my life never match.

I don’t know why I won’t allow them to, whether it’s an admission of the unreliability of time or if I’m just trying to give myself enough time to go back and try to fix small errors I have made, to cheat the system again.

I used to drink coffee in the mornings with James Tralmer and he'd laugh on cue at all of my incredibly dumb jokes.

I used to like the words ‘morning commute.’

I used to believe in my wife, to trust her implicitly, but now that’s gone.

She came in without a word.

There was an unfamiliar and foreign air hanging around her, a new color in her aura.

There was something ineffable about the way she flipped her bangs out of her face, the preternatural sheen of stolen lust that shone like Lucifer’s torch upon her no longer furrowed brow.

She had been released from something and I knew that something was me. She had been paroled and my arguments about her being inconsiderate were going to mean nothing to her now, less than nothing.

She was no longer bound to this earthly realm. She had been translated.

The Cornish game hen, long abandoned, had come to dissipate in spirit form. It was now nothing more than an amorous odor that slunk across the kitchen tiles like an accusation no one in particular was willing to acknowledge.

Clean and clear and in control, I had thought, as I removed all traces of it.

This was no great loss.

‘Breath,’ I told myself.

‘Breath slowly, deliberately, in and out. In and out.’

‘Something is different here,’ I thought.

It was written on her face in words so thick I didn’t even have to try to make them out.

This is what she had intended from the start.

She wanted me to know.

She wanted to make sure there was no way I could avoid it. There was no way to ignore her now.

She had committed this crime against us, against me, and there was no way to let her slide by with a smile.

She reminded me of a puppy that shits on the carpet and then waits for you to come along and see it.

She reminded me of a petulant child basking gratuitously in her wrongdoing and taunting me to upbraid her, daring me to be indignant so she could turn it all around on me.

I wondered how long she had spent arguing with me in her head, playing this exact scene out over and over, practicing the blocking.

She reminded me of myself, of the simple pleasures associated with shame when it is stripped of any real guilt, detached from regret or penance, devoid of concern or sympathy.

‘Don’t forget to exhale.’

It had happened and now she was forcing me to name it, to give words to it, to acknowledge it and breathe life into its lungs.

It had happened and now she was forcing me to drag it out into the light and expose it, brindled and new, a cancerous lung, prodded and examined, while regurgitating our past transgressions.

‘Do it now. Breath.’

‘She has cheated,’ I thought. ‘She has committed adultery and now she wants me to call her on it so we can throw names at each other, so we can assign blame for the lost and atrophied parts of our lives.’

I was so tired by this point in my marriage.

Boxes of immaculate Chinese food, uniform, expected, calculable, stood where the more exotic cuisine once had been intended. I hadn't eaten. I had been having a different argument in my head, gaining focus, for well over an hour.

I had been working on my blocking.

You wanted me to talk about my feelings.

You told me to be specific, to tell you how I felt, to allow myself to relive the moment fully so I could heal and let it go.

I want you to know that no matter how sorry I am or how much she apologizes, it can never take away these awful feelings I get when I think of another man touching her.

I want you to understand that I am not avoiding anything here.

I am not protecting myself with sarcasm.

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