by Laird Hunt
The End
But all of a sudden John and Deau were there. Look, it’s all over, I said. What is, Sport? they said. They had someone with them. This guy is a beekeeper, John said. My bees make good honey, the beekeeper said. He had quite a nose. It looked like it was about ready to fall off. The two of us sat up and moved over, and John and Deau sat down beside us on the blanket, and the beekeeper, standing off at a slight remove, settled right into talking. He was quite a beekeeper. He seemed to favor words of more than two syllables, and gave quite a speech on a number of interconnected subjects, despite the nose, which really did look, the whole time he was holding forth, as if it was about to tumble off his face onto the grass and maybe even bounce very lightly once or twice when it did. That evening after dinner, having thought carefully about what the beekeeper had said, or having attempted to, I told John that nature was not in the least bit fascinating and that there was nothing natural about it and that honey baskets and pollen hunts were creepy, as were, if you thought about it, velocity and preponderance, not to mention minute digestive tracts, and that nature didn’t have any fucking plan, and the elements, all ninety-fucking-two of them, in fact the entire fucking periodic table of elements and all the other charts the old beekeeper had mentioned, could go fuck themselves, and that whatever I had said about it in the past was untrue, and that, furthermore, he, John, had been absolutely fucking right that time to go berserk and beat the shit out of me. Shut up, said John. Correctly. Then we went back to the city.
IN THE CITY, THEN, IT WAS ALL WORSE AND ALL OVER AND ALL everything, but we were not quite there yet. We were not quite there when we began being there by dropping them off at her apartment, the car quiet for a moment as we all said good-bye. Then, still not quite arrived, John and I returned the car to the rental agency and walked back over the river to my apartment. It was much colder in the city, even if we were not quite there yet, than it had been in the country. It was cold and a wind was blowing, a real wind, and we had bags to carry and were underdressed. The river, even with all its real and reflected bridges receding off into the distance, looked unforgiving and slightly angry. If it is possible for a river to look angry. I think it is.
Then we had arrived.
As a boy, I lived for a time in a room that looked out across a small empty lot onto a high white wall somewhere in a very small town, somewhere. The wall was as wide as it was high and, itself windowless, filled my window entirely. It was to this large white wall that I woke each morning, and it was at this large white wall, dimly illuminated by service lights, that I looked each night. Sometimes, during the day, birds flew along the wall. Or threw their shadows onto it. But that was all. For years. In its near impeccable blankness, is what I would like to say, it produces a memory, this wall, that, upon conclusion of the incidents I would now like to relate, I found, and in fact continue to find, soothing.
Then, I repeat, we had arrived.
Both in the city and at my apartment, which had been taken to pieces.
John looked at me, then at the remnants of the apartment, then went berserk.
Fuck, I said, for my part. Several times.
When he was calmer, which was some minutes later, he asked for an explanation.
What he said was, yours or theirs?
Mine.
Yours?
Yes.
What the fuck?
I know.
You don’t know anything.
True.
You don’t know shit.
Yes.
He picked something up off the floor and said, I bought this nifty keepsake in a little market on the side of a mountain in the middle of a rainstorm.
He held up a piece of it.
He held up a piece of something else.
I said something.
He said, fuck you, then we kind of wrestled around a little until he was on top of me.
Uncle? he said.
Yeah, uncle, I said.
Say Uncle John.
I said it.
He got off.
He walked around a little.
Then he sat down.
Okay, he said. Okay, fine. All right.
I nodded.
He looked at me.
We sat there.
All right, so why did they do this?
I shrugged.
He grabbed the back of my neck, pulled me forward a little, and punched me.
So I told him. Everything.
He agreed with me, 100-fucking-percent as he put it, that my actions or nonactions or whatever the hell I wanted to call them had been stupid.
Nice work, Mr. Jackass, is exactly what he said.
I asked him if I could get him anything. Maybe a snack or something.
He said, yeah.
I said, what?
He said, shut up for fuck’s sake, stupid, what did you do with it?
I told him.
He looked at me.
So why haven’t they gotten it yet?
Because I think I may have put the wrong address on it.
Jesus, he said.
Speaking of stupid, or of stupidly, I am put in mind of the following anecdote once told to me, or actually twice. A former colleague was set the task, well within her expertise, of executing the following procedure: (1) removing someone’s kidney; (2) laying said someone on his / her back in a bathtub full of ice cubes; (3) placing a note on his / her chest, which would read along the lines of, if you would like to live please dial Emergency. Part 1 was approached carefully. Part 2 was accomplished neatly. Part 3 was unfortunately, however, forgotten, too bad, effectively botching the exercise, which had been meant only to serve as a warning. Later I tried recounting the anecdote, but could not remember which part of the procedure the former colleague had left out, and so subsequently solicited and received a retelling of the anecdote by a colleague who was neither the one who figured as the hero of the anecdote, nor the one who had first told it to me, but rather was a third colleague, who for practical reasons was also intimately acquainted with the details of the affair.
I am not entirely certain, in this instance, that I have used the word, hero, correctly.
Ah, well.
It suddenly occurred to us that what was stupid was for us to be sitting there.
On the way out the door, John said, not without justification, and I suppose it would have ruined your little instance of intractability to just bring it back to them, and I said, yeah, I guess.
We decided to split up. First, though, we tried to call her apartment. No answer. Several possible reasons presented themselves, a couple of which neither of us wished to contemplate, and we decided that we would each, individually, continue to try calling, because going over there right now was out of the question. We split up. Each of us, as it occurred, with someone following. A little while later I got clubbed on the head.
But first, for a while, I went through the city with someone following me. I have already mentioned that it was cold. Then it started to rain. It was the sort of rain, as it has been throughout, that is far from being pleasant. And perhaps because of thinking about the unpleasant rain falling on and around me, and, by extension I suppose, about the sometimes mysterious and unpleasant rain that I had used to hear falling behind the stretch of wall in my apartment, not to mention, at times, behind a much larger stretch of wall in my dreams, I thought of the downstairs neighbor and of the hole puncher and of John’s account of his dealings with the downstairs neighbor, I mean of how he had dealt with the downstairs neighbor, and of tenant relations, that too, absurdly.
I walked along the river in the rain for a while, then stopped walking along the river. This for two reasons. Three. One was the fact that John had, so recently, told the story, or rather, the expurgated story, of our experience with the corpse in the flowered skirt, which is, with several facts added to it, entirely different. I don’t know why, in fact, he felt obliged to bring it up. All of it was a mistake, right from the start, both in its i
nception, and in its absurd conclusion—the part which I described John relating while we all sat telling each other stories under a tree.
It wasn’t her, he had said after I had heard the shot and he had climbed back to the car where I was waiting for him.
What do you mean? I had said.
I mean it wasn’t her. I didn’t get a good look until after it was done.
That was one reason. Another was the earlier and above-mentioned bit of business I had done for the organization I was now in trouble with.
That bit of business had involved this river, a big bag, and some rocks.
The third, strangely, was the beekeeper, and his monologue about nature and God-knows-what.
Nature, had said the beekeeper, is really quite intelligent. Both as to its inceptions—he was the first to have used these words—and its conclusions. Do you wish, he had asked us, to speak of punctuation? Do you wish to speak of commas and semicolons? Ellipses and apostrophes? Nature possesses it all. Take for example your average bee. Happening to have a dead one or two in his pocket, he had done so. He went pretty fast. He went from bees to planets and from grammar to physics in about three-and-a-half sentences. It was, the dead bee he had passed around, a planet in a solar system and the solar system in the galaxy and the galaxy in the universe. He explained the connections. Which allowed for curved space and chaos theory and dark matter and a few other things. It did all seem quite intelligent. The way he described it. Extremely.
So what you are saying is that everything is dead like the average bee? I asked him.
But at that moment he was called away.
Walking along the river I found myself wondering if, in all its morpho / syntactical brilliance, nature would be smart enough to make me, say, take a bullet in the back of the head.
After the beekeeper had concluded his discourse, which he had only ended because his wife, somewhere off in the distance, had begun calling him with a bullhorn, we talked about honey for a while. We had all, we confessed to each other, been pleasantly lulled by the old man’s voice and dead bees and chewed-up nose—it was only later that I became agitated. We lay there on our backs talking about honey, about its different colors and grades—yum, we said—and wondered aloud if dead bees produced ghosts as dead fleas, it had been said, did, and if ghosts of bees would go on making honey and what that honey would taste like, probably not so good, though we couldn’t be sure, but sooner or later we’d find out, and we concluded that nature, especially given the creation of honey, all kinds of honey, really was, as the beekeeper had said, quite smart.
Honey was smart.
Honey was brilliant.
Even if I, another aspect of nature’s expression, wasn’t.
That night, incidentally, out there in the country with her, I dreamed hooks again.
And again, in the face of my utter distress, she was admirably, heartbreakingly calm.
I called her apartment. She answered. I got clubbed over the head.
That was certainly a clear-enough conclusion.
Think of its complexity, the beekeeper had said. I would require an entire sheet of paper to list all the treasures it contains. It is so very, very complex, he had ended, shaking his head.
Very, very complex indeed. When I woke up the first thing I saw was a shelf with a jar of honey sitting on it.
John, incidentally, was not clubbed over the head, as he had managed, he later told me, to slip the tall, thin woman who was following him. This maneuver had involved entering the restaurant where we had once had our turkey dinner, and leaving that restaurant by way of a window. Having slipped the woman, he had called their apartment and got her. We’re fine, she said. Where’s Deau? Shopping for dinner. And in a manner of speaking, that was true. Dinner was cooking, my dinner. I smelled onions and stewed apples at almost the same time I saw the shelf.
I don’t know when the two of them left. Perhaps, of course, they did not leave, and throughout the process were sitting among the shelves in the back room, some of which, no doubt, were still empty, having not, as yet, found objects for themselves.
Or sets of circumstances. E.g., the fact that I want to be the captain of a hot air balloon. Now. One could set that circumstance on a shelf.
Or of a dirigible. Although in that case there would be engines involved, and instruments. I’m not sure if instruments are needed on a hot air balloon. No doubt they are. Instruments and instructions. And charts. I will have to learn how to read charts. And to navigate at night. That could also be set on a shelf. Even the same shelf. Fragile objects that float at night with things and instruments in them.
Or just drift. A dirigible adrift. Of course, a dirigible adrift eventually explodes. I saw footage once—not pretty. Or a projectionist. Another shelf. That too. Projecting film, silent film, onto a white wall. Which is what I used to imagine I could do. See above. Back then.
But the story really is still out by the river where I really still was, looking down into the cold, slightly angry-looking water, figuring that, at least until circumstances might determine otherwise, I would keep some distance between it and myself.
Mine was a medium-sized not overly great-looking earnest-appearing individual. I stood on one end of a bridge, he stood on the other. I knew this one. He was one of the best and was going to be hard, if not impossible, to slip. Hello, I called across the bridge to him. He didn’t appear to hear me. I waved. He didn’t appear to see me. I began walking. He followed. It was quite an interesting relationship.
Off we went. Up the streets and down them and through doors and up escalators, I mean elevators, very small ones, but also I do mean escalators, or escalator, it is a rather funny word, as they all are, said over and over again.
It is possible, in this city, to cover distance underground. I did so. Through doors and down stairs. Corridors like snakes. Bright posters and glistening tile walls. People coming toward you in trickles and bursts.
Off in the distance, down one of the corridors, I heard music.
Voice and instrument.
Each after the other.
Gal I knew.
Hello, I said.
Part of the time she was one of us.
Right now, as far as I could tell, she was not.
She let go of her instrument, let it hang from a thick strap around her neck, and held out her hand.
You? she said, glancing down the long hall at him.
Yes, I said.
She nodded and started singing again so I dropped a coin into her hat and pushed off.
As I rounded the next corner and moved up toward the exit I heard another coin dropping, the other’s coin dropping, and the voice, which by the way was impossibly low and lovely, stopped.
Then I stopped.
Then it started again, with the instrument this time, and I started again, only, having started, found myself walking back the way I had come, so that, having re-rounded the corner, I was now walking behind him. He was not far ahead of me, and not moving fast, a nice easy pace, and his legs were shorter than mine and he looked a little, perhaps, round in the middle, and limped slightly, that was important, so that probably, conditions permitting, I would have him soon, I thought, only at that moment I passed her again and she nodded again and the music stopped.
She shrugged.
I dropped another coin.
He, in passing her again, after me again, did not.
So that was that and, back outside, we walked around like before until I was tired and sat down in an establishment where they served nice big drinks, one of which I sent over to him.
A few weeks before someone had sent one over to me.
I raised my glass.
He appeared not to notice. He appeared not to be drinking, either, but did, of course, and was.
I was trying to develop a plan.
I am no good at all, I believe I have already mentioned, at planning.
Nevertheless, I thought that I could somehow employ the paradigm of the dove-co
ming-out-of-the-hat trick, as described above. Yeah, I thought. I thought, somehow you understand, that I could reverse it, the idea of reversal having rather effectively just injected itself into my mind. It seemed to me that I could make the dove (myself) disappear into the hat (some receptacle) if I could only figure out some equivalent for the swishing of the hands. Dove, I said to myself. I swished my hands around a little, practicing. He was, without appearing to be, watching me. That was the problem. Even if I was a dove, the trick could never work if he was watching me. I mean if he was watching me while he was supposed to be watching my hands, or the putative equivalent thereof, swish around. I had been the proof of that—at the event, when I was sitting on the floor, before I had become a dove.
I’m a dove, I said.
The waiter shot me a look.
I kind of eased off on being a dove and got up.
He got up too.
It was a little like wearing a well-tailored, loose-fitting jacket.
Albeit one made of eyes.
For a second I thought about running. But then I remembered hearing about someone who had tried running on him. So I walked. Wearing the jacket. Quickly, but I walked.