One alligator
Two alligators
Thr—
Straining slightly to hold the heavy watering can, Silvia walks back to the garden. The whole thing is planted in perfectly straight lines—probably Hartford’s doing, she thinks. Peas curl up bamboo posts, their new shoots clinging tight; star-shaped yellow flowers preface as yet miniature cucumbers, also vining their way up pale bamboo. The clusters of tomatoes are still young and let off such a familiar smell: they smell so perfectly of green.
The water absorbs quickly into the earth, and as soon as it’s gone the dirt looks dry again. Silvia touches the ground but finds it damp, spongy, as it should be. Seconds later the furled leaves stretch flat to face the sun and the stalks straighten as they fill with the water. It looks as if the tomato plants are breathing, the way they move and sway on their own. Watching this, she feels a little bit heroic. Her back is sweating, so she ties the bottom of her striped T-shirt in a knot above her navel. Wind catches the wet skin and turns it cold.
A bumblebee blunders about the lavender stalks, pulling the flower heads down with it as it lands on one, then another. It’s actually the closest she’s ever been to a bee in nature. Or maybe it’s just the first time she’s looked closely. The bee is encased in fuzzy armour, much more black than yellow. Its antennae are as long as its legs, but the back legs are squat like a quarterback’s. The wings, muddy-pellucid, remind Silvia of reused cling film.
As she’s checking to see if the carrots are orange beneath the earth, a large grey thing runs straight for her ankles and weaves between her legs, purring like a revved-up machine. It’s a cat. It’s a cat without a tail.
“Hey, little guy,” she murmurs, petting his back. “Where did you come from?” His fur feels greasy; it comes out in clumps. Though he has only a small stub where the tail should be, like a rabbit’s scut, his back arches and the stunted tail flicks from its base the way an ordinary cat’s would. After she’s stroked him tip to tail he runs off to the zucchini plants and stares into space, completely still, as though he can see something that she can’t. She’d read somewhere that cats have eight times more light-sensing rods in their eyes than humans, and that this greater vision is more remarkable than can ever be fully comprehended. Some people think it means that cats can see ghosts.
Returning the fertilizer to its place in the greenhouse, Silvia sees Cynthia there through the window, sorting some papers. She drops the fertilizer to undo the knot in her top, re-covering her abdomen, then goes in.
“Hi,” Silvia says, hovering awkwardly by the door.
Cynthia jumps—the moment before fear finds its object, when the heart is caught in the air—then sees Silvia. “Goodness, you startled me.”
“Sorry,” Silvia says, “sorry—I should have knocked, I was just, the fertilizer—”
“Not at all.” Cynthia rights herself, her hands shifting off a stack of papers, and smiles uncomfortably.
“Who’s that?” Silvia sees the thing that Cynthia’s hands had been covering up: a photograph of a woman, slightly older than herself.
“Who’s who? Oh.” She sees what Silvia is pointing to. “That’s Hilary.”
Hilary. The woman the taxi driver said she looked like?
“Sorry,” Silvia apologizes again. “I thought it was—for a second it looked like me, and I didn’t—that didn’t make sense, obviously.” She laughs.
Cynthia nods.
There’s silence for a moment.
Silvia mentions the cat.
“Oh,” Cynthia says, turning to open a blue file folder. “That’s Toby.”
“He’s yours?”
“Sort of.”
“He doesn’t have a tail.”
“I know.”
“What happened?”
“We had to do it for his sake.”
Silvia starts walking backwards, making her way out of the greenhouse, too stunned and filled with dread to probe any further, but Cynthia continues, reeling her back in: “Silvia, I was wondering—how is your writing going?”
“My writing? Oh! Fine, thanks.”
“Really? You’re finding it inspiring here?”
Silvia, standing still, looks around at the tools on the walls, the empty Mason jars, the bags of dirt tipping onto the ground. She nods meekly.
“What exactly is it that you write?” Cynthia pauses, waiting. When Silvia says nothing, she continues: “Short stories? Poems? A novel? Or—?”
“Poems,” Silvia says. “I’m not very . . . experienced or anything, though. I haven’t really written anything yet. I’m still settling in, I guess.”
“Right.” Cynthia nods knowingly, but unlike with most people, Silvia can tell she really does understand. “Well, thank you, Silvia.”
It’s clear that Silvia is being dismissed now, so she leaves, walking out backwards, feeling like she’s seen something she shouldn’t have and cannot unsee.
BACK IN THE HOUSE, on her way to her room, Silvia pauses at the window in the upstairs hallway to see if she can see the part of the forest where Cynthia took her to remove the swarm. She wants to see how it all fits together, to see if from this bird’s-eye perspective (albeit that of a low-flying bird) she can get a sense of the land. She stares and stares but can’t make any more sense of it from here. She looks down instead, where she can see Dan, Ben, and Monique in the garden. Then a sound brings her perspective even closer: there’s a buzz-banging right before her, and she suddenly sees a bee, which must have been dormant, come to life on the window ledge. It’s trying to fly out the closed window, and every time it bangs into the glass it drops down in the air by an inch or so before catching itself, buzzing back, and thrashing against the glass once more. She quickly tries to get a grip on the wooden window frame and lift it up, but it’s jammed, she can’t even budge it. The bee keeps banging, the buzz of its wings getting louder. She puts her finger near the back of its body, and the bee stills. She moves her finger, and the bee moves.
“Wow.” She lets out a breath.
She lifts her finger up and the bee follows, lifting off the ledge and hovering by the still jammed window. She drops her hand, and the bee drops too.
“Ibrahim!” She calls into his room. “Can you help me open this?”
“What’s up?” He ambles to the doorway, then sees her clutching the window frame. “Fresh air?”
“No, this bee, it’s stuck, I’m trying to free it.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” he says. “There’re a few thousand more in the garden.”
“Please?”
“Okay, sure,” he says, sensing her concern. He comes over, bends his knees, grips the handle, and as he stands he lifts the window with the posture of a heavyweight champion.
The bee hovers, its wings beating so fast they’re invisible, until Silvia gestures out the window. “You’re free.” As if understanding, the bee flies out, and Silvia feels immense relief. “Thank you,” she says to Ibrahim.
“No worries.”
She smiles. They’re both hovering in space, drawn between their separate rooms and the common hallway.
Ibrahim rakes his fingers through his long hair. “Well, I was just coming up for a nap before dinner,” he says, though that’s not what he’d planned on saying.
Silvia looks at him, at his eyes. They hold each other there. “See you at dinner then, I guess?”
He nods, backing into his room. “Later.”
She goes to look out the window, making sure that the bee has in fact flown away. There’s no sign of it. She puts her hands on the ledge, about to close the window again, but decides to leave it open.
XVII
DINNER IS HOMEMADE MEATLOAF, though Hartford clarifies that it wasn’t made in this home. There’s a quiet inertia to the group, and Silvia can’t tell whether it’s due to exhaustion or intimacy. Everyone eats in silence, serving themselves salad and seconds.
At the end of the meal, Cynthia breaks the peace. “I hear you’re having trouble slee
ping, Ibrahim.”
He swallows his mouthful, nodding. “I’ve been painting, yeah. Night’s the only time I can work.”
Cynthia pauses as if to mull this over, though it’s clear that in raising the subject she’s already made up her mind. “I’d like to give you the mornings off, then. You’re so talented and devoted, I think you need time to work on your personal projects.”
A different kind of silence follows.
“Uh—thank you,” he says, stumbling over his words. “That’s really . . . kind.”
“Not at all.” She smiles modestly.
A mumble circulates around the group and Ibrahim catches Silvia’s eye questioningly, but Silvia shrugs, as if to say, It wasn’t me.
XVIII
THE NEXT DAY they are assigned a group task: to repair broken hive frames and clean out all the combs. The sound of grumbling can be heard above the dull buzz of bees all the way to Smooth Rock.
“We have to degunk all these?” Ben groans when he sees the teetering pile of framed honeycomb.
“And Cynthia expects this will only take a day?” Monique says, looking not at the pile but at the rest of the group, imploring.
Cynthia isn’t sure whether the problem is mould or wax moths, tiny papery things that feed on the honeycomb and are a sure sign of a stressed hive, but whatever the problem is, it needs to be aborted before it develops any further. The bees have been getting agitated.
“Well, many hands make light work, right?” Silvia says.
“Save it, Silvia,” Monique snaps. “Cynthia’s not around to hear you.”
AT THE BEGINNING, none of them knew very much about bees, or honey. They are learning from doing—and a few of them from reading the information Cynthia has provided. The foremost fact is this: each bee has its role.
First, of course, there is the queen, the largest of them all. In any colony there is only one queen, and her sole purpose is to lay eggs. Once a new queen has been introduced and accepted, she takes a mating flight, during which she’ll lose her virginity. She flies straight up, about thirty feet in the air, followed by a whole pack of drones. Ten, twenty, forty—as many as a hundred. This typically occurs over a couple of days, but unlike most organisms that mate over and over again for the production of each offspring, this singular incident provides the queen with a lifetime of viable eggs. She’ll store the sperm collected over these few days in an internal sac and use it to produce fertilized eggs for workers or unfertilized eggs for drones. By mating with a large number of drones, the queen assures the hive of genetic diversity, and this, according to both Darwin and Cynthia, helps promote flexibility and longevity. The biological desires of bees, as with any animal, are 1) to survive, and 2) to procreate.
Drones have only one purpose too, and this is to mate with the virgin queen. Until then they loaf around the hive, and once their task has been completed, they die. Their purpose has been fulfilled. Drones are all males, and they neither work nor sting.
Then there are the worker bees. Worker bees are all females, and as their name suggests, they do all the work. They have three main jobs, depending on their age. Immediately after hatching they become nurse bees, looking after and feeding the new eggs and larvae. Inside the hive it’s completely dark, so in the combs they work in blindness. Bees are deaf too, so in their early days in the hive, touch is their only sense, and they rely on this for all communication.
The nurses work for about ten days before becoming house bees, keeping the hive clean and clear of debris and storing the nectar that has been brought into the hive by the foraging workers. House bees fill the comb cells with the nectar, then seal them off with a wax lid. Inside the cells the nectar is transformed, as if by alchemy, into golden honey.
Another rank of house bees produces the wax and shapes it into the thin, miraculously hexagonal cells. Another still will guard the entrance to the colony and keep it cool by fanning their wings. They take their turn as house bees for another ten days and then become foragers themselves, going out to collect pollen and nectar for the colony. This is their first experience of the outdoors. Imagine, all that light and colour must be . . . startling. A zillion flowers in every hue, and the three foremost colours: green grass, blue sky, yellow sun.
The bees work so hard at this last task that after three weeks of foraging they have literally worked themselves to death.
AFTER AN HOUR or so repairing the frames, the assembly-line aspect of group work has established itself organically: each person has a task, and the work goes quickly.
Alicia picks up a frame, gives it a wipe with a wet cloth, then hands it to Ben, who checks the wood, then hands it to Dan, who sprays it with Clorox, then hands it to MJ, who looks for live moths. If she finds any, she throws them in a pile behind her, but if she doesn’t, she hands it to Monique and JB, who sit down with the frames in their laps and pick away the wax, handing the frames to Silvia, who sprays them with mint and fresh lemons (wax moths hate the stuff and avoid it like the plague) before adding the frame to the pile neatly to be stored in a freezer, to kill whatever might remain.
Nobody talks except to utter the occasional question or express exasperation. “Pass it to me”; “Did you see anything on that one?”; “It’s so hot, eh?”; and then, eventually, as the grumbling mounts, “This is impossible” and “Such fucking bullshit.”
“It is so not fair that Ibrahim doesn’t have to do this.” Monique stops working to pick out wax from under her fingernails.
Nobody replies. Everyone continues working until the work is done, but it’s enough.
The seed has been planted.
XIX
THE GROUP FILES IN, all sweaty and dirty from working, as Hartford is straining the spaghetti for dinner, steam obscuring his face as if he were in a film noir. Someone’s tuned the radio to a smooth, dinnertime jazz station.
Monique is the first to sit down, and she takes her chair backwards, her legs around the seatback. “So,” she says to Ibrahim, “what did you do all morning?”
“Worked,” he says, filling up a glass of milk from the jug.
“Oh yeah? On what?”
“A painting.” He makes it clear that he doesn’t want to talk about it.
“Right.” Ben sits down next to Monique and twists the top off a beer bottle with his bare hands. The bottle gasps. Something about this is menacing. “About that”—he necks it and looks at Cynthia—“when will we get a chance to do our art?”
Cynthia looks back at him. Ibrahim looks at her—everyone looks at her—but nobody can tell what she is thinking. She says nothing.
“I thought this was supposed to be an artists’ colony.” Ben stands up halfway, his thick thighs supporting the weight of all the hesitation in his muscles, then sits back down. “And only Ibrahim is getting to work on his art.”
Ibrahim: “Hey!”
Dan: “It’s really not fair that he gets mornings off while the rest of us work.”
Ibrahim: “But—”
Ben: “We wanted to make a documentary about it here, artists and bees and stuff, those kinds of artistic connections, you know, but nobody would want to watch a bunch of inexperienced youth hoeing away in the dirt.”
“You have free time every day.” Hartford is quick to the defense, but he isn’t quite sure what he should be defending. “But do any of you work on your art?”
“Obviously,” Monique interrupts, eager to get involved. “This isn’t just about art, it’s about the freedom to make art, and none of us have any freedom.”
“If you show the same level of productivity and talent,” Cynthia says, speaking calmly, practiced, “then we can discuss adapting your work schedules too.” She looks from Monique to Ibrahim, then catches something in her periphery: Ben is standing just outside the candlelit ring around the table, holding his phone. Looking steadily at him, she says, “Will you shut that off, please?”
He doesn’t stop filming but flips the phone around to capture the reaction of the group.
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Dan looks at his brother, gestures, and Ben starts circling around the table, keeping the lens trained on Dan, who’s now standing, as if at a podium. “We’ve been here for over a week. We’re doing all your chores and heavy labour, but if we don’t have time to ourselves, what exactly is in it for us?”
The silence that follows is clear as glass.
Cynthia’s voice is smooth as marble. “Look, I don’t really know what to tell you. What did you expect when you came here? Some kind of summer camp?”
No one responds. The question hangs in the air.
“The creative work you do in your own time is your responsibility—how much you get done, what you want to make. You can leave any time you want.”
XX
SILVIA WAKES EARLY, before the bell. The light comes through her window like a veil, gauzy and fleeting. She has eleven minutes until she has to go down for breakfast and chores and interactions, which will all pull her out of herself, so for now she lies in bed, thinking. About who she was just a few weeks ago and who she is now. Is she the same person? Do people ever really change? Does it matter?
There’s a sense of inevitability that comes from living in the moment: things flow smoothly into one another without forethought or preparation. Organic, authentic. This seems to make sense with her understanding of religion, if one is living in Christ, but her personal feelings are at odds with the greater implications of this. She’s not sure whether the complicated Christian system of cause and effect really applies. What if one thing doesn’t lead to another? What if you make each thing happen for yourself, all the time? What if each thing is separate? For now it feels slightly treacherous even to articulate this thought in her mind, so she blanks it out.
She stretches out under the thin white sun-warmed sheet and looks out the window. Cynthia is out there already, working near the hives on the back lot, wearing a straw sun hat and a sleeveless button-down shirt. Her arms are surprisingly strong. Silvia can see her biceps beneath the skin as she lifts large hive boxes into a stack.
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