The Bee Keeper's Fever Dream

Devan Sagliani

January 2006

You wanted to know how I felt and all I can say is that it hurt, it still hurts, and I’m hoping you can help me make it stop.

I just want the love and the pain in my heart to end, like a mutual suicide pact.

Some days I just want to stop feeling all together.

I was losing composure.

I was looking at her in disbelief.

I was expecting her to laugh.

I spoke first like a bewildered child.

"Who is he?"

Her eyebrow peaked like some over arching actress in a silent film, symbolic and wry.

She was not going to waste her moment, not going to bother with denials and hyperbole.

She was beyond that.

She was totally empowered and all I could think to myself was how tragic and unfair it seemed that she needed to betray me to get to that place.

"His name is Howard. I met him at the college. He makes me feel completely alive, like a violent wind blowing through shaking trees."

I was speechless. Light and unfettered mirth caroused in her soft, unrepentant pupils like false kindness.

She had her strength back.

She had enacted her revenge on me for my need for control.

She had seen the monster that I was becoming, had become, a full-tilt misogynist, and had outright rejected it.

She was glorious in all of the ways that I hated because I never could be. Her perfidy had taken me by surprise and words were beyond my grasp.

I wish I could say that she threw herself on my mercy, then and there.

I wish I could tell you that my heart opened up and forgave her, and that we spent the night making love and working things out.

I wish I could tell you that her mistake made me a better man.

It didn’t.

I am still the same selfish prick I have always been and the only difference is that now I know it.

Yes, we spoke that night, but not in complete sentences. I wouldn’t allow that. I was way too calm, trying to reassess my position. A myriad of possible futures presented themselves to me, one at a time, fleshed out and then smashed like fine china on coarse, ugly stones.

‘I am still in control,’ that’s what I thought. It was a natural reflex. I was falling back on the only thing I knew.

You called it reverting to a defensive posture once, when I first came to see you.

You seemed so understanding then.

I still believe you can help me. That’s why I’m writing all of this down.

‘I can handle this.’

I wish I could tell you that I didn’t end up locking myself in my office and pacing back and forth in silent, angry contemplation.

The numbers were starting to come back wrong.

The data was erroneous and contaminated.

I picked up my acupressure balls and hurled them through my office window. They broke the pane and soared like an angry interloper into the Childers’ yard, missing their beloved barbeque and rolling lost into the grass.

I wanted Francine to hurt like I hurt.

I wanted to knock her to the ground and straddle her, my fingers slowly locking around her delicate nacre throat, and take the breath out of her forever.

I wanted to return her to clay, till death do us part, ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

I wanted to see her like I used to see her, with adoration and desire and hope again.

The world was filled with a violent explosion of breaking glass for a brief moment and then everything began to fade away. I had a blanket hidden in the closet and a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. Francine never even came to check on the sound. I heard the bath start and stop.

I drank.

I might have cried.

I descended into a coma.

When I awoke to the sound of the house phone ringing it was six in the morning the following day.

My head throbbed as I answered the phone.

Doris was dead.

Daytime physicians had found her.

She was stiff with rigor mortis, that’s what they said.

She was blue, that’s what the voice told me.

She did not suffer much, they duly reported.

It’s easy to see the future when you have all of the information laid out at your disposal.

Everything becomes clear. To my great relief, my mother-in-law Doris, the metaphoric albatross which hung snugly around my neck, was finally dead, asphyxiated, from choking on her evening pudding.

Francine beat me with her fists when I told her.

Francine looked at me like I had killed her mother myself, with fear and confusion, and it hurt me more than I could ever tell you in mere words.

Francine cried in my arms for over an hour when I told her, and I held her and would not let go.

The last time we met you told me that I needed to focus on all the reasons I first fell in love with my wife.

You told me to think of how things started, to go back in time and reconnect with the relationship we once gave birth to, to remember what made it special.

You told me to nurture the love we both once cherished.

I’m not sure if this is working.

I’m not sure that things make any more sense than when I started writing this journal.

I’m not sure that you know what you are doing.

You told me to be brutally honest.

The first few strokes back into her felt like some kind of breeching. She felt new to the touch, to my senses.

It had been six weeks since I had slept with her.

It had been six weeks since she had confessed to the crime of accepting the strange, the other, and now I felt like I was the one cheating.

Some things don’t need words.

Some things are so primordial, so embedded into our animal psyche, that they will never be confined to the crude syllables of our blunt, primitive reason.

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