At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  And Aimee? She’ll lose her safe artificial world: the bus, the identical fairs, the meaningless boyfriend. The monkeys. And then what?

  18.

  A few months after she bought the show, she followed the monkeys up the ladder in the closing act. Zeb raced up the ladder, stepped into the bathtub and stood, lungs filling for his great call. And she ran up after him. She glimpsed the bathtub’s interior, the monkeys tidily sardined in, scrambling to get out of her way as they realized what she was doing. She hopped into the hole they made for her, curled up tight.

  This only took an instant. Zeb finished his breath, boomed it out. There was a flash of light, she heard the chains release and felt the bathtub swing down, monkeys shifting around her.

  She fell the ten feet alone. Her ankle twisted when she hit the stage but she managed to stay upright. The monkeys were gone.

  There was an awkward silence. It wasn’t one of her successful performances.

  19.

  Aimee and Geof walk through the midway at the Salina Fair. She’s hungry and they don’t want to cook, so they’re looking for somewhere that sells $4.50 hotdogs and $3.25 Cokes, and Geof turns to Aimee and says, “This is bullshit. Why don’t we go into town? Have real food. Act like normal people.”

  So they do, pasta and wine at a place called Irina’s Villa. “You’re always asking why they go,” Geof says, a bottle and a half in. His eyes are a cloudy blue-gray, but in this light they look black and very warm. “See, I don’t think we’re ever going to find out what happens. But I don’t think that’s the real question anyway. Maybe the question is, why do they come back?”

  Aimee thinks about the foreign coins, the wood blocks, the wonderful things they return with. “I don’t know,” she says. “Why do they come back?”

  Later that night, back at the bus, Geof says, “Wherever they go, yeah, it’s cool. But see, here’s my theory.” He gestures to the crowded bus with its clutter of toys and tools. The two tamarins have just come in and they’re sitting on the kitchenette table, heads close as they examine some new small thing. “They like visiting wherever it is, sure. But this is their home. Everyone likes to come home sooner or later.”

  “If they have a home,” Aimee says.

  “Everyone has a home, even if they don’t believe it,” Geof says.

  20.

  That night, when Geof’s asleep curled up around one of the macaques, Aimee kneels by Zeb’s cage. “Can you at least show me?” she asks. “Please? Before you go?”

  Zeb is an indeterminate lump under his baby-blue blanket, but he gives a little sigh and climbs slowly from his cage. He takes her hand with his own hot leathery paw, and they walk out the door into the night.

  The back lot where all the trailers and buses are parked is quiet, only the buzz of the generators, a few voices still audible from behind curtained windows. The sky is blue-black and scattered with stars. The moon shines straight down on them, leaving Zeb’s face shadowed. His eyes when he looks up seem bottomless.

  The bathtub is backstage, already on its wheeled dais waiting for the next show. The space is nearly pitch-dark, lit by some red exit signs and a single sodium-vapor lamp off to one side. Zeb walks her up to the tub, lets her run her hands along its cold curves and the lions’ paws, and shows her the dimly lit interior.

  And then he heaves himself onto the dais and over the tub lip. She stands beside him, looking down. He lifts himself upright and gives his great boom. And then he drops flat and the bathtub is empty.

  She saw it, him vanishing. He was there and then he was gone. But there was nothing to see, no gate, no flickering reality or soft pop as air snapped in to fill the vacated space. It still doesn’t make sense, but it’s the answer that Zeb has.

  He’s already back at the bus when she gets there, already buried under his blanket and wheezing in his sleep.

  21.

  Then one day:

  Everyone is backstage. Aimee is finishing her makeup and Geof is double-checking everything. The monkeys are sitting neatly in a circle in the dressing room, as if trying to keep their bright vests and skirts from creasing. Zeb sits in the middle, beside Pango in her little green sequined outfit. They grunt a bit, then lean back. One after the other, the rest of the monkeys crawl forward and shake his hand and then hers. She nods, like a small queen at a flower show.

  That night, Zeb doesn’t run up the ladder. He stays on his stool and it’s Pango who is the last monkey up the ladder, who climbs into the bathtub and gives a screech. Aimee has been wrong that it is Zeb who is the heart of what is happening with the monkeys, but she was so sure of it that she missed all the cues. But Geof didn’t miss a thing, so when Pango screeches, he hits the flash powder. The flash, the empty bathtub.

  Afterward, Zeb stands on his stool, bowing like an impresario called onstage for the curtain call. When the curtain drops for the last time, he reaches up to be lifted. Aimee cuddles him as they walk back to the bus. Geof’s arm is around them both.

  Zeb falls asleep with them that night, between them in the bed. When she gets up in the morning, he’s back in his cage with his favorite toys. He doesn’t wake up. The monkeys cluster at the bars peeking in.

  Aimee cries all day. “It’s okay,” Geof says.

  “It’s not about Zeb,” she sobs.

  “I know,” he says.

  22.

  Here’s the trick to the bathtub trick. There is no trick. The monkeys pour across the stage and up the ladder and into the bathtub and they settle in and then they vanish. The world is full of strange things, things that make no sense, and maybe this is one of them. Maybe the monkeys choose not to share, that’s cool, who can blame them.

  Maybe this is the monkeys’ mystery, how they found other monkeys that ask questions and try things, and figured out a way to all be together to share it. Maybe Aimee and Geof are really just houseguests in the monkeys’ world: they are there for a while and then they leave.

  23.

  Six weeks later, a man walks up to Aimee as she and Geof kiss after a show. He’s short, pale, balding. He has the shell-shocked look of a man eaten hollow from the inside. “I need to buy this,” he says.

  Aimee nods. “I know you do.” She sells it to him for a dollar.

  24.

  Three months later, Aimee and Geof get their first houseguest in their new apartment in Bellingham. They hear the refrigerator close and come out to the kitchen to find Pango pouring orange juice from a carton. They send her home with a pinochle deck.

  Fox Magic

  Diaries are kept by men: strong brush strokes on smooth rice paper, gathered into sheaves and tied with ribbon and placed in a lacquered box. I know this, for I have seen one such diary. It’s said that there are also noble ladies who keep diaries, in the capital or on their journeys in the provinces. These diaries (it is said) are often filled with grief, for a woman’s life is filled with sadness and waiting.

  Men and women write their various diaries: I shall see if a fox-maiden cannot also write one.

  I saw him and loved him, my master Kaya no Yoshifuji. I say this and it is short and sharp and without elegance, like a bark; and yet I have no idea how else to start. I am only a fox; I have no elegancies of language. I need to start before that, I think.

  I was raised with a single sibling, a male, by my mother and grandfather in the narrow space beneath Yoshifuji’s storehouse in the kitchen garden. The storeroom’s floor above our heads was of smoothed boxwood planks; there was dry, powdery dirt between our toes. We had dug a hole by one of the corner supports, a small scrape hardly big enough for the four of us.

  It was summer. We sneaked from the garden and ran in the woods behind Yoshifuji’s house, looking for mice and birds and rabbits. But they were clever and we were hungry all the time. It was easier to steal food, so we crouched in the shadow of the storehouse and watched everything that went on in the garden, waiting.

  The cook, a huge man with eyes lost in rolls of fat, came out some days a
nd pulled roots from the dirt. Sometimes he would drop one, and I would wait until his back was turned and run out, exposed to the world, and snatch it. Often the cook came to the storehouse. We eased farther back, listened to the latch open, and the man’s heavy footsteps over our heads, one board creaking; and then the sounds of his leaving, the latch being secured and sounds of his footsteps scuffing up the walk to the house.

  One day we listened, and there were the noises, just as there should be, but—The latch was not twisted shut. I looked at my brother, who crouched beside me. We said nothing, for we were just foxes, but we knew what we wanted. No one was in the garden. We crawled out and ducked into the open storehouse door. There were the foods, just as we had smelled them: a hanging pheasant and dried fish, pickled radishes, sake and vinegar. We knocked over jars and chewed open boxes and ate and ate.

  The shout at the door took us completely by surprise. The cook was back: he was cursing at us, at the damage we’d done. I spun around, but there was nowhere to hide; I backed into a corner and bared my teeth. The cook slammed the door shut. This time we heard the latch.

  Panicked, I scrabbled at the walls, at the tiny cracks in the floor through which I could smell my patch of dirt. I cracked my claw and smelled the thread of fresh blood.

  There were voices outside the door again, and it was suddenly thrown wide. The cook was howling, yelling with rage. A woman stood behind him in rich robes, with a huge red fan concealing her face. I’d seen her before: I knew she was the mistress of the house, Shikibu. She tilted the fan slightly to stare in at us. Light through the fan colored her skin, but she was very beautiful. I growled; she screamed and jumped back. “Foxes!”

  The third person looking in was Kaya no Yoshifuji. He was in hunting dress, blue and gray, with silver medallions woven into the pattern of his outer robe. In one hand he held a short bow; arrows stuck over one shoulder from a quiver on his back. His hair was oiled and arranged in a loop over his head. His eyes were deepest black; his voice when he spoke was low and humorous. “Hush, both of you! You are making it worse.”

  “Oh, Husband!” the woman cried. She was shaking. “They are evil spirits. We must destroy them!”

  “They are only animals—foxes, young foxes. Quiet, you are frightening them.”

  Her fingers knotted on the fan’s sticks, “No! Foxes are all evil. Everyone knows this. They will destroy our house. Kill them—please!”

  “Go.” Yoshifuji made a gesture at the cook staring open-mouthed at Shikibu. The man ran up the path and into the house. My lord turned to Shikibu. “You must not stay out here where everyone can see you. You are being foolish. I will not kill them. If we just give them a chance, they may run off on their own.” Yoshifuji turned his back on her. “Please go inside.”

  She looked in at us again. I felt my ears flatten again, my back prickle with lifting hairs. “I will leave, Husband, because you order it. Please come to me later?”

  Shikibu left us. Yoshifuji knelt in the dirt of the garden for a long moment with his hand over his eyes. “Ah, well, little foxes, so it goes, neh?—

  “ ‘Foxes half-seen in the darkness;

  I have courted knowing less of my lady.’ ”

  I recognize now that what he said was a poem, even though I wasn’t sure what a poem was. It is a human thing; I don’t know how well a fox can ever understand it.

  He stood and brushed at his knees. “I will be back in a bit. It would be wise to be gone before then.” He paused a minute. “Run, little foxes. Be free while you can.”

  I couldn’t stop watching him as he walked up to the house. It wasn’t until my brother bit me on the shoulder and barked that I followed him through the door and down into our hole.

  I learned to cry that night. Crouched together in the scrape, my family listened in silence. After a time, Grandfather laid his muzzle against mine. “You have magic in you, Granddaughter: that is why you can cry.”

  “All foxes have magic, Grandfather,” I said. “They don’t all cry.”

  “Not this magic,” he said.

  After that I crept often to the house’s formal gardens. The carefully shaped trees were cover to me as I approached the house itself, which was of cedar and blackened wood, with great eaves. In the shadow of a half-moon bridge I leapt a narrow stream; I slid past an ornamental rock covered with lichens and into a small willow tree that slumped down to brush the short grasses that grew near the house. Lost in the green and silver leaves, I crouched there and watched. Or I hid in a patch of glossy rhododendron. Or under the floor of the house itself; there were many places for a fox to conceal herself.

  I watched whenever I could, longing for glimpses of my lord or the sound of his voice; but he was often gone, hunting with his friends or traveling in the course of his duties. There were times, even, when he stayed out all night and returned just before dawn with a foreign scent clinging to his clothes and a strange woman’s fan or comb in his hand. It was his right and his responsibility, to live a man’s life—I understood that.

  Still, I felt a little sorry for his wife. Her rooms were the innermost of the north wing, with layers of shoji screens and bamboo blinds and curtains-of-state between us, but it was the seventh month, and she left as many of these open as she decently could, and sometimes I saw her, almost lost in the shadows of the dark-eaved house. She had a handful of women: they played children’s games with tops and hoops; they practiced their calligraphy; they wrote poems; they called out the plaited-palm carriages and went to the monastery and listened to the sutras being read. It seemed clear that all these things were merely to fill her time until Yoshifuji came to her. Her life was full of twilight and waiting, but I envied her for the moments he did spend with her.

  And then Shikibu left to visit her father’s family in the capital. She took her women and many servants, including the fat cook. The house was very still and empty. Yoshifuji was home even less often, but when he was there, he was almost always alone. He spent a lot of time writing, taking great care with his brushwork. Most evenings at twilight, he walked through the formal garden and into the woods, to follow a sharp-smelling cedar path that led between two shrines. I paced his walks in the woods and tried to see his expression in the dusk.

  There was one night when I crouched under the willow. My lord sat alone in a room with the screen walls pushed back. I think he was just looking at the garden in the moonlight; maybe he was drinking sake as well. His face was lit by the red coals of a brazier and by the reflected blue light of the full moon. My heart hurt, a sad heavy weight in my breast. Tears matted my cheek fur.

  A shadow slid past the ornamental rock and settled next to me. Grandfather touched his nose to the tears and to my ribs, which belled out without flesh to soften them.

  “You will die,” he said. “Without food, you’ll waste away.”

  “I don’t care. I love this man.”

  He was silent for a while. “Nevertheless,” he finally said.

  “Grandfather. We are foxes and we have magic. Can we bring him to us?”

  “Is this what you want?”

  “Yes. Or I will die.”

  “If you want this, we will do what we must,” Grandfather said, and left me.

  The magic was hard to make. We worked a long time on it. I am a fox, but my grandfather and mother made me a maiden, too. My hair was as black and smooth as water over slate, and fell past my layered silk robes. One night I looked at myself in a puddle of water. My face was as round and pale as the moon, which delighted me.

  My grandfather made me a small white ball, which glowed in the shadows. I looked at him curiously.

  “For playing,” he said. “You’re a maiden. You can’t just wrestle with your brother anymore. A ball like that is traditional for a fox maiden.”

  “I don’t like playing with a ball.”

  “You don’t know yet if you do or not. Put it in your sleeve. You will want it sooner or later. It will pass the time.”

  We made the spa
ce beneath the storehouse a many-roomed house, with floors and beams worn to a glow from servants’ constant rubbing; and trunks and lacquered boxes filled with silk robes and tortoiseshell combs, porcelain bowls and silver chopsticks, Michinoka paper and bamboo-handled brushes and cakes of ink, a ceremonial tea set glazed to look like pebbles seen underwater. No, we did not make these things, exactly: it was still just bare dirt and a dry little hole. But we made it seem as if it were so. I can’t explain.

  We filled the house with many beautiful things, and then we made a garden around the place filled with stones and ponds and thick bushes. It would have been a fox’s dream had I still been a fox. We placed a sun, a moon, stars, just like the real ones. We made many servants, all quick and quiet and clever.

  And we made my family human. My brother became small and exquisite, with narrow poet’s hands. We made my mother slender with a single streak of silver in the black hair that fell to her knees. And Grandfather was very handsome. He wore russet robes with small medallions on each sleeve; when I bent close to see what they represented, he smiled and pulled away. “Fox paws,” he said.

  I sat in a billow of skirts and sleeves behind a red and green curtain-of-state. I had a fan painted with a poem I didn’t understand in one hand; I kept staring with wonder at the way the fan snapped open and then shut, and at the quick gestures of my human fingers that made this happen. My family was arranged around me: my mother behind the curtain with me, Brother and Grandfather decently on the other side. Mother had a flea; I saw fox-her lift a hind leg and scratch behind one ear, and, like a reflection on water over a passing fish, I saw woman-her raise one long hand and discreetly ease herself.