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DAY TEN
What was the difference between the first time I saw the Other Side, when it was daytime there, and the time I tried to go and look at it again and it wasn’t there?
I’m thinking like a detective.
I’d been drinking whisky.
It’s a tempting idea and not to be totally discounted. I could try again; take a nip of whisky and then go back to see if the opening has disappeared, but my reasoning seems off somehow. It would make much more sense, would be more charitable, to assume that a mirage like that would appear when I was under the influence of alcohol, not when I wasn’t.
I was wearing different clothes. Jeans and a flannel shirt.
As I ponder this I shove my hands into the pockets of my bee suit.
In the right-hand pocket is the clip with something rustling and fragile inside it.
The queen bee.
*
Now I remember, and I tear my gaze away from the velvet night of the Other Side and towards the door into the junk room.
My old bee suit.
I was wearing it. On that day, that evening. I thought I was wearing it for the last time, because I knew that the new one had arrived.
But I couldn’t go to get it from town until a week later, and I hadn’t gone to the hives either. That whole time was like a fog to me.
And it was on that same day, the day I saw the first empty nest. I put the queen into the pocket of my old suit, clip and all, thinking I would send it in to be analysed. And then I forgot about it, of course. Anybody would have forgotten under those circumstances.
Yeah. And then I brought the suit to the junk room.
And if I hadn’t torn the new suit I never would have got the old one out again, let alone put it on. But I did tear the new one, and I needed the old one again temporarily.
I was wearing it when I came to get a brick. The queen was in the pocket, and the opening was here.
When I came back in my jeans and flannel shirt, after I had the whisky, the opening was gone.
Now I have a queen in my pocket again. The queen from the empty hive. And the opening is here.
I look up at the hovering bit of starlit forest night in the junk-room wall, then squat down and lay the clip with the queen in it on the grey floor. I stand up.
Immediately it’s more cramped and dark. No matter how I move my head, all I can see is wood, just a wall.
I crouch down again, carefully pick up the body of the queen and stand up, swaying, my eyes closed, because now I’m afraid either that I’ll see the opening or that I won’t, I’m not sure which.
I open my eyes and look straight out through the round frame at an untouched landscape tinted blue and black, and the twinkling starlight and tranquil night radiates from it.
I look at the queen lying in my palm.
The first time I looked out of the opening it was daytime. Beautiful, sunny.
And what was my foremost impression? The hypnotic, rich, joyful hum of swarms of nectar-gatherers over the meadow.
*
Now I remember very clearly something Pupa used to babble about (it was Ari who called it babbling, in that gently teasing way of his).
Although he was a modern bee-keeper Pupa could recite old Finnish spells and runes. How did that one go?
Honeybee, bird of the air
Fly away and see
Ever upwards to the skies
Up to the seventh heaven!
Or that other one:
From the Earth the bee rose swiftly, On his honeyed wings rose whirring,
And he soared on rapid pinions, On his little wings flew upward.
Swiftly past the moon he hurried, Past the borders of the sunlight,
Rose upon the Great Bear’s shoulders, O’er the Seven Stars’ backs rose upward,
Flew to the Creator’s cellars, To the halls of the Almighty.
I need to find more information.
But before I do I have to rest, clear my head. It’s been a long, long time since my body’s had what it needs. Things like sleep. Oblivion.
Although it seems horrible to say goodbye to the opening (I still don’t know if I’ll ever see it again) I pull the ladder back up and lower it through the trapdoor into the barn. I stumble down the steps, checking twice to make sure the queen is safe in my pocket.
*
I go into the house and carefully lay the queen’s body on the bureau. I put an upended coffee cup over it so that no draft will blow it away or toss it on the floor like trash. My mind conjures an image of a lost bird flying in through the window and snapping the queen up in its beak, crunching contentedly.
But I do have another queen, the one in the clip in the pocket of the old bee suit, in the junk room.
If the thing’s even there. I didn’t check. Why would I? I just have to believe.
*
I brush my teeth and go to bed. For the first time in many, many days my firm mattress and cool sheets work the way they’re supposed to. I let forgetfulness gradually wind itself around me.
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES
FAQ YOU!
Since readers of this blog seem to be asking the same questions again and again in their comments, I’ve decided to put together an FAQ section. You’re welcome!
QUESTION: Who exactly are the Singers, and what does the name mean? You don’t sell sewing-machines, do you?
ANSWER: Our group is an international animal rights organization. Its original, official name is the Army Pro Animal Liberty, or APAL. The Finnish branch of the organization had the idea to use the word animalist, the name used by the characters in George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm, and thus took the name Animalist Revolutionary Army. But because the ideology of the ARA is largely based on Animal Liberation, the well-known work by Peter Singer, the Finnish organization is commonly referred to as the Singers in the media. So it’s a name we’ve been given rather than one we’ve chosen.
QUESTION: So who exactly is Peter Singer, and what’s his deal?
ANSWER: Peter Singer’s Wikipedia information can be found here. His ideas can be summed up briefly thus: humans and other warm-blooded animals should be equal. They should be treated well and be allowed to live in a way that’s normal for their species, and humans don’t have a right to use other warm-blooded animals for food.
Animals whose products can be used without having to kill them (like wool-bearing sheep and milk cows) should be treated as ethically as possible. They should be allowed to procreate freely, to live in their own herds or other communities, should not be shut up indoors except when the climate demands it, and their bodies should only be used when one of them dies naturally or when something like illness requires euthanasia. Some members of our organization also believe that animals – any animals – should never be used for food. The justification for this point of view can be found in Jonathan Foer’s excellent book Eating Animals.
QUESTION: But if we stop eating animals won’t we be restricting our food supply to a ridiculous extent?
ANSWER: A person certainly doesn’t need animal protein every day, and fish is just as good a source of animal protein as meat is. Legumes such as soy are also a source of very high-quality protein that people could eat directly instead of cycling it through a cow’s organs. Ninety per cent of the world’s soy harvest is used as cattle feed, and the raising of cattle accounts for a larger portion of global warming than transport does. Methane emissions from cattle significantly exacerbate climate change, and raising cattle wastes and pollutes huge quantities of fresh water. To raise one kilogram of meat requires tens of thousands of litres of water.
QUESTION: But animals are just animals, after all. Why should we care about them?
ANSWER: We believe that warm-blooded animals (and many other animals, such as octopuses) are thinking, feeling beings capable of suffering, often able to solve abstract
problems. Some of them use language. Animals are, in short, conscious.
QUESTION: If I want to support ARA’s activities can I sign an online petition or something?
ANSWER: The Animalist Revolutionary Army doesn’t believe in petitions, press releases or demonstrations. Instead, you can participate with us in direct actions. We have two divisions: the Tangible and the Intangible.
The Intangible Division specializes in informational rather than physical activities. It uses various viral means and methods such as social media. The Intangible Division digs up the truth about the mistreatment of animals and spreads it around. It’s kind of like an animal rights WikiLeaks. If you want to participate in uncovering unpleasant facts and statistics about eating meat, publishing exposés on the unhygienic conditions of meat production, the treatment of animals in abattoirs, the diseases and disorders of animals on factory farms, the grotesque aspects of sausage-making or the negative health effects of continued consumption of animal protein, you are very welcome to join the Intangible Division. Of course, we’re also looking for positive material, such as true stories of domesticated animals’ ability to communicate, their empathy and their real heroic acts. We’re happiest when we manage to rake some muck on the activities of individual cattle producers, abattoirs or animal breeders. Members of the Intangible Division have, among other things, infiltrated farms and abattoirs and worked inside production facilities producing audio and video recordings as evidence. The information they’ve gathered has been instantaneously and visibly made public. We’re also looking for capable nerds, because the media isn’t always our friend. Last year this area of meat production tried to prevent the publication of the information we’d obtained in this company’s newspaper by threatening that this retailer would withdraw its ads from the paper if what we’d found was published. The Intangible Division hacked into the newspaper’s website and within a few hours had succeeded in anti-marketing two meat industry players such that following their hack one of the companies was facing bankruptcy and the other, one of Finland’s largest food producers, is facing an expensive consumer legal action.
QUESTION: Got it. And what about the Tangible Division?
ANSWER: The Tangible Division practises direct action. It regularly liberates pigs, chickens and beef cattle. Its purpose is not just to let the animals loose in nature because they wouldn’t thrive there. ARA simply wants to make life harder for meat producers. Once meat producers are forced to track down their pigs from neighbouring fields a few times some of them eventually hang up their gloves and go into the organic-pea business. :-) We also have other forms of direct action, which I won’t discuss here for obvious reasons.
QUESTION: Isn’t your liberation of animals a form of animal abuse?!
ANSWER: There’s no denying that most liberated farm animals hunker down around the doors of their prisons. It’s the only place they know, unfortunately, the only place that represents at least some kind of safety and regular sustenance.
LEAVE A COMMENT (total comments: 61)
USER NAME: Idiots
Not surprisingly your club hasn’t thought this thing all the way through. Did you know that at this very moment the woods of Oedema are populated by a relatively lively herd of pigs? I’m not talking about wild boars; these are wild pigs descended from the ones you lot set free. Now that we’re having mild winters they’re able to survive winter in the wild, reproduce and spread. A person I know in Sipco told me that they see them around the compost heap all the time, bold as can be, digging up and destroying vegetable patches in their allotment gardens and otherwise behaving like pigs – if you’ll pardon the expression! City rabbits are nothing compared with these swine, I tell you! If one of these lightweight hybrid cars collides with a full-grown pig on the local roads the car gets the worst of it. The pigs that have survived for a few generations have been selected to be bigger than heck and aggressive and they’re not the cute pink piggies any more, they have stiff, greyish black hair growing on their backs. You should be ashamed!
USER NAME: ProGL guy
Sooner or later Ordnung Muss Sein, if you know what I mean. And it’ll be Endlösung for you hippies.
USER NAME: aren’t they cute
Here we go again. Pampered brats making life hard for the rest of us because they have nothing better to do. If it were up to me you’d all be forced to move to the woods and live on pine needles.
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DAY ELEVEN
I wake up and start searching.
I go to the console and look some things up. The links and references soon form an endless, wandering labyrinth where I dance, reconnoitre, turn in circles. I don’t set any bookmarks, don’t take notes. Who would I send them to?
It’s enough that the labyrinth starts to form a pattern that makes my heart beat faster.
The traditional stories of many cultures agree that bees have always been associated with life, death and, above all, rebirth.
In any mythology where bees appear they’re almost without exception tied to the Other Side. They’re sometimes even deified. And it’s not just local stories – the myth is universal.
I’m no longer surprised that in almost every folk culture bees move easily between worlds.
*
Virgil wrote that bees possess a divine intelligence.
The shared name for the Indian gods Vishnu, Krishna and Indra is Madhava, or the one born of nectar. (And the Finnish word for nectar, mesi, is one of the oldest in the language and has its roots as far back as the Sanskrit word for honey, madhu, an etymology common not only to Finnic languages but also the Greek and Anglo-Saxon world, where we find the word mead to refer to an intoxicating drink prepared from honey.)
One representation of Vishnu is a bee in a blue lotus flower – and the lotus is, coincidentally, an ancient symbol of life and rebirth.
For the ancient Germanic people, perfectly ordinary air was swarming with the spirits of the dead. And they also called the air by the name Bienenweg – the bees’ road.
As recently as the nineteenth century the Mordvins worshipped the god Nishki Pas, the protector of bees, who controlled the countless dwelling places of the dead in heaven.
The Mycenaeans built their graves in the form of beehives because bees symbolized immortality.
When the Christians fled to the catacombs to escape Roman persecution, they carved bee figures in the walls as a reminder of resurrection after death.
In the Middle Ages it was generally believed – and is still believed in some countries – that if bees are not told of their keeper’s death they’ll go to heaven to look for him. In the southern USA beehives are sometimes covered in black cloth after their keeper’s death so that the bees won’t leave.
Eero often went with me to take care of the bees. But did I tell the bees about his death? No.
And the bees left. My, what a coincidence.
In Greece it was believed that bees had a close connection with the spirits of the dead or even that the dead lived on in bees. The ravines and caves where bees lived were roads to the Other Side.
I almost laugh out loud when an all-too-familiar example comes up, one so obvious that I’d forgotten it: in the ancient Finnish Kalevala, Lemminkäinen’s mother follows her son to the shores of the river Tuoni, finds him dead and summons a bee to bring him back to life.
*
And then.
The most grotesque coincidence possible.
The search takes me to a page that I just skim at first, indifferent, then electrified, then with my heart pounding wildly. There’s only one thing it could be – Eero’s other blog, the anonymous one.
Perfecting the Human Species.
The blog the police were talking about.
The words ‘bee’ and ‘resurrection’ led me to it. I quickly read the post. He’s talking about colony collapse …
I can’t read it now. Not now.
I bookmark the page then realize that the website won’t nece
ssarily be on the web much longer. It’s quite possible that the Singers will take it down or that somebody else will remove it, someone who wants to delete their ramblings from the comment section after the fact, for instance. In fact, I ought to have thought about whether I should, as a family member, delete the blog Eero kept under his own name. Nothing is ever really gone from the net, but still … The police already got the user name and password from the web server. They’ve left it to me to decide what to do with it.
It’s possible that the website I’m looking at has already been deleted from its original address. It could have been copied and deliberately disseminated to make it harder to manipulate or destroy.
I copy the entire contents of the website on to the console’s hard drive.
I remember a story Ari told me. It was stupid, but at the time it made me shudder. One of his friends, back when he was in the USA, had gone to visit Canada and sent him a postcard from just across the border at Niagara Falls.
The man was in an accident on the way home and died. My father learned of his death from his family and work colleagues before he ever heard from him.
Then the postcard arrived.
‘Greetings from the other side,’ it said.
Eero’s blog posts are greetings from the Other Side.
Maybe I’ll read them a little at a time.
But not now. I don’t want to read them now.
I rouse myself and go back to what I was meaning to do.
*
I know, I know, my sceptical friends, I keep repeating as I slurp boiling hot coffee, my hands dancing over the console remote, you sceptics who have an explanation for everything, as if you were there, in ancient Finland or Mycenaea or India: the withdrawal of the bees into their hives in winter and their awakening in the spring may have seemed miraculous, like a resurrection. But that doesn’t explain everything. Why, for instance, didn’t the hedgehog, who hibernates in the winter just like the bees do, become part of a legend of messengers between worlds?
Because hedgehogs don’t have wings, you’ll say. It’s the flying, a thing people can’t do, that gives bees a magical aura …
The Blood of Angels Page 8