by James Greer
Nearby he heard sirens, a common occurrence in his violence-prone neighborhood. Joe chuckled softly at the thought of some beer-bloated briar being hauled downtown to sleep it off in the county lockup. He stroked lightly the bristly ends of his thin mustache with thumb and forefinger. Later, the police would tell him that Michael had passed out as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning, lost control of the car, spun completely around, and smashed into a utility pole. He was still alive after the crash but comatose from the gas, and died soon thereafter without regaining consciousness. It fell to Joe to break the news to Michael’s family and friends.
Joe slipped slowly into a vague and restless sleep. He had not been asleep long, and had just begun dreaming, something about Amanda taking a trip by train—who takes train trips anymore?—and him at the station seeing her off, when the phone in the hall outside his bedroom began to ring.
He stood on a platform and watched her pull away—in oneiric time, impossibly slow, but giving somehow the impression of movement nonetheless. The rhythmic ring of the phone insinuated itself into his dream, taking on the sound of the train’s leisurely chug. Amanda leaned out of an open compartment window in a way that only happens in movies, or dreams, waving and blowing kisses to him that he would pretend to catch with a clownish clapping motion and smuggle into his pocket. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks, propelled by a sure sense that she was leaving for good, that he would never see her again. “Don’t go!” he pleaded, or tried to plead. His mouth opened but no sound came out. “Come back!”
Strange are the structures unconscious fate imposes on our formless desires. One man, drugged insensible by an invisible, scentless gas, will imagine he sees a group of stars in a chance clearing in the clouds and hears with perfect clarity the astral music of his own death song; another, held close in the arms of sleep, will translate the incidental intrusions of the waking world into the language of his secret fears.
The ringing phone became more insistent, but Joe was not yet fully awake. The cadence of the phone now gave voice in his dream to departing Amanda Early, who kept repeating calmly and evenly, her brown eyes with ochre flecks fixed at a spot well above his head, “I love you, goodbye. I love you, goodbye.”
Appendix A: Sources Consulted
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1980
Benjamin, Walter, Das Passagen-Werk, Frankfurt Suhrkamp, 1982
Bergson, Henri, Time and Free Will, Authorised Translation by
Pogson, F. L., M.A., George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1910
Browne, Thomas, Religio Medici, Roberts Brothers, Boston, 1889
Cope, Julian, The Modern Antiquarian, Thorsons, London, 1998
Cordier, Henri, Ser Marco Polo: Notes and Addenda to Sir Henry
Yule’s Edition, John Murray, London, 1920
Lieber, Lillian R. and Lieber, Hugh Gray, The Einstein Theory of
Relativity, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1945
O’Hanlon, Sean, Miserogeny, Odeon Press, New York, 1948
Palmer, Abram Smythe, The Samson-Saga and Its Place in Comparative Religion, I. Pitman, London 1913
Pollard, Robert and Sayers, Stephanie, “People Are Leaving,” Waved Out, Matador, New York, 1997
Ryvvers, Trip, Exit Flagging, Unpublished Manuscript, 1995
Shorbuck, Stanley, I Shit You Not: A Rational Guide to Irrational Music, Vintage Classics of Rock Criticism, New York, 1989
Vollman, William T., Rising Up and Rising Down, McSweeney’s
Books, San Francisco, 2003
Wright, Orville, Unpublished Journals, 1889–1948
Zamyatin, Evgeny, We, Gregory Zilboorg, Translator, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1924
Appendix B
Translation of a fragment from Das Bienenzüchter sucht nach Ruth, by Wilhelm Kneissl
… ridiculous theories about dancing bees and color vision. Might hoodwink the academy and the Vienna graybeards and Saunders at Princeton (idiot), but I am not misled. His methods are flawed, his conclusions unsupported by a shred of reliable evidence—and yet the plaudits, the laurels, are his and his alone! That his dance language might be accepted (however temporarily) galls me. Sooner someone destroy my own hives, my tapes, my notes, than see his pseudo-science adopted as doctrine.
The scientific community is often impugned by the public it serves for making of skepticism a religion, but in this case a little attention to creed might have been in order. His eloquence and passion for honors has conquered the better judgment of reasonable men, unprepared for the onslaught of Von Slipp’s fierce [the word Kneissl uses is grell, which is more commonly a quality of light, harsh, dazzling. ed.] ambition. The ridiculous photographs of himself he provides the scientific journals to accompany his papers (what vanity!). His profile, his aspect: every inch the profound and respected biologist. Pah! I’ve never seen these pictures myself, but I’ve had them well described to me. Meanwhile, my own work in the same area molders in neglectful shade, and I can scarcely afford even the rent on this two-room shack in the shadow of the Matterhorn. O Fame! O Fortuna!
“How vainly men themselves amaze,” the poet writes [Quotation in English—from Marvell. ed.]. I have a sufficiency of truth unto myself. Watching this buffoon crowned with honors and riches—as if he were not already an aristocrat!—grows tiresome, and I am tired, too, of writing letters of protest to the appropriate organs.
“Dear Gentlemen of the Academy, it is my sad duty to bring to your attention the following errors …” “Dear Editor, perhaps it would interest your readers to know that you have printed an article containing lies …” “Dear Professor, I warn you for the last time to stop all this nonsense before the Cause of Science is irreparably harmed …” Never so much the courtesy of a response. I must look a proper fool [Gimpel, ed.], a country simpleton [Einfaltspinsel, ed.], a stupidhead [Dummkopf, ed.]. I, who: struggled from the day I was born; had to educate myself; was not provided with the privilege accorded a high-born like Von Slipp—I am the one to be scorned? I should be worshipped for my efforts. I have earned my way by the careful husbandry of what small talent God granted me. Unlike some, I was not able to avoid the rigors of military service, nor the unspeakable horror of two wars, by hiding in a research institute.
As a result—even now I am ashamed to admit—I am blind as Von Slipp is rich. The hindrance my disability has presented in my work bothers me less than the burden to my daughter, who has in addition to her own troubles the better part of mine to carry on her frail shoulders. She is only sixteen. Because of me the ordinary delights of a young girl are foregone. Because of me she spends her time attending to an old man’s needs instead of attracting a young man’s attentions. She is beautiful, and sharp-minded, and graceful in every way, and were she not stuck nursing a cripple in the middle of nowhere, suitors would pile up like the drifts of snow under our eaves every fortnight.
We do our best, though. We live. Anna’s mother, Hilde, left us when Anna was a baby, not even one year old. Hilde (née Grolsch) had married a reasonably ablebodied university graduate who, before the second war, had a reasonable career as a librarian at the University of Vienna, a fine institution, the oldest university in the German-speaking world, founded in 1365. I worked there happily for twenty years, in the Art and Architecture department, under Dr. Feldman, a wonderful man who went meekly, uncomprehending, to the camps and never returned. After the war, everything was different, Vienna no less than my sightless self. I made inquiries at my former office but no one had use for a blind librarian, and I was unwilling to take the position I was offered—a pathetic sinecure, offered out of pity for a broken war veteran, and hardly enough to support a wife and infant daughter. But I do not blame the university: What else could they do? Likewise, I do not blame my wife for leaving: What else could she do? I had returned an invalid, bitter and proud but useless, who had moreover saddled her with a child and no means to feed or clothe her. Anna was conceived during a two-day leave from the Eastern Front in fall of 194
4, three months before the grenade blast that robbed me of my eyes.
I was hopeless with guns. In the literal heat of battle—which is always hot whatever the weather, because the body heats radically in its suit of fear—huddled at the bottom of a foxhole next to the severed parts of several colleagues, it was much more than I could do to stop my hands shaking long enough to bolt my rifle, which moreover was clotted with mud and ice and grease. Even had I mastered myself sufficiently to climb to the top of my hole and try to shoot, nothing but vague images, shadows, running through the artillery smog, would present themselves as targets. I will tell you now that I shot only once in my military career, and that in so doing I murdered the woolen hat of my sergeant which he had lost leaping into a nearby defilade. By the time the war was over, in May, and I had returned home, guided by a fourteen-yearold Wehrmacht recruit, my wife had remaining less than one month of confinement before giving birth, in late May, to the daughter I have never seen but whose existence has been my only joy. Before the end of the year Hilde was gone, moved back to her mother’s in Salzburg and remarried within two years’ time to a bricklayer, who naturally prospered in the postwar reconstruction.
Had begun keeping bees before being called away to the war, and when I returned and could not find any real work, the bees were our salvation. Soon learned the layout of my backyard’s rows of hives, and could navigate without help their orderly ranks. When she was old enough, little Anna helped carry the dripping combs to the little shack, where we scraped them into pans and then filtered the raw honey into mason jars. I hired a housekeeper when I could afford one, but for the most part we made do for ourselves. I learned to judge locations from intensities of sound. I learned the pattern of echoes from familiar objects, and developed such familiarity with their unseen outlines that I imagined, in my inky cave, that I could see the shadows on the wall, so to speak. At night I had vividly colored dreams—my night life was bright, well-sighted, visionary in the truest sense. I often woke up crying.
What is the language of bees? I know, and you know, Anna, my only daughter, my love. We know. The bees speak to you, and you alone understand their honeyed tongue. We discovered your gift by accident, years ago—you could not have been more than nine—when you chased a little blue butterfly in the clover between the rows of my hives while I checked the humming honeycombs. Accidentally you knocked into the leg supporting one of the hives and the whole construction toppled over, perilously close to where you frolicked. I could not see this happen, of course; but my memory of the event, stitched together from the evidence of my remaining senses and your own account, has stayed with me as if I had. I shouted an alarm: but you turned and faced the gathering swarm, and spoke several inhuman syllables in a sweet, singing tone that had an immediate calming effect on the bees, who regrouped and returned to their damaged hive—which I rushed to set right upon receiving assurance that you were unharmed.
“Papa, the bees are sad,” you said to me.
“I know, sweetheart, but we will make them happy again soon. Their house is broken but we will fix it for them. I’m only glad they did not choose to sting you.”
“Oh, but I told them I was sorry.”
“That was surely the right thing to do. But the bees don’t speak our language, so they may not have understood you.”
“That’s why I used their language, Papa. At first they were angry about the damage to their hive, but when I explained that it was an accident and that I was only trying to catch the little butterfly, they laughed and warned me to be more careful.”
Naturally I ascribed Anna’s story to the invention of a precocious child. Naturally I treated her with the benign condescension of all good parents everywhere. I asked her how she had learned the bees’ language, when no one else had even thought the bees might speak. She replied, sensibly, that she did not know, but that she understood everything the bees said and they seemed to understand her as well. I asked her to demonstrate. She did, to my satisfaction (this process took place over several weeks and months, but I am conflating for effect). When she spoke bee-language, Anna’s voice took on a pure high tone that her regular speaking voice would not seem capable of producing. Indeed she told me later, when she was older, that the tones were produced largely in her nasal cavities, and that if I could see her when she spoke bee-language I would laugh, because she had to throw her head back and flare her nostrils to get the right sounds.
Convinced that she was neither inventing nor imagining her ability to converse with bees in their own tongue, I resolved to document her gift when I had accumulated sufficient evidence to present to the unsuspecting world the irrefutable secrets of the apis. Who knew what wisdom lay locked in the manychambered hive?
Then came Von Slipp, with his dancing bees, who direct their colleagues to fruitful pollen sites and back by means of a complex system of wagging and wiggling.