Swarm

  Marvin’s face was pale and there were circles the colour of charcoal smudge under his eyes. He looked older, even though it had only been five or six days since I’d seen him. I left the clothes in a heap in the basket and glanced back at the door, the empty porch, the closed kitchen window.

  Quietly, I said, “Why didn’t you tell me about her?”

  “Phoenix?”

  I nodded.

  “Which part?”

  “Walter,” I said coldly. “What’s with all the fucking secrets?”

  He sighed and shook his hand like he was waving away smoke. When he said my name and stepped closer, I knew he had bad news. I braced myself. The silence was marked by the soft patter of the wet clothes, not wrung out enough, dripping on the dry earth.

  “What? What is it?”

  I was still waiting when Phoenix came outside, carrying a shovel to dig a fire pit under the spit. She moved down the porch stairs and I turned around, blocking her view of Marvin. I wanted to push her back, stand between them, pry the two worlds apart. But I think she saw the guilt on our faces.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked as Thomson appeared, holding a dresser drawer to turn into kindling. The door slammed shut behind him, closing on our snug, private home. I flinched at the blast of noise.

  Marvin stood apart from us and told them about the bombing. His voice a monotone, speaking in a way that meant it didn’t matter anymore because it had already happened. It was fact. Nothing could change that. I wrapped my arms around myself, unable to stop him. Thomson and Phoenix listened, and when Marvin finished, Thomson threw the drawer onto the floorboards of the porch. The rectangle shifted into a diamond shape.

  “Are you incapable of change?” he called down to Marvin as if from the deck of a ship.

  “This isn’t about you,” Marvin said. “You had your time; you did things your way.”

  “You think my complaint is about ego?” Thomson yelled.

  Marvin held his hands up, palms turned outward, giving up. Phoenix stared at me.

  “This morning . . .” she said.

  “I was going to tell you.”

  “The fire, the night you came down.” Her mouth moved into a half-smile. “Shit,” she said, and she crossed her arms around the handle of the shovel. I saw the walls that had so recently dissolved between us reset themselves. Thomson’s cheeks seemed to collapse, as if a sinkhole had opened inside him. He was shaking his head, his mouth the worm of a scowl.

  “Thomson,” I said.

  “There’s something else,” Marvin said loudly, staring straight at me.

  “The travel agent?”

  The others watched. Marvin shook his head, staring down at the ground. “She’s fine,” he said and lifted his eyes to look at us. “It’s Margo.”

  A shivering terror went through me, like that feeling in a nightmare when you realize the bad guys are right behind you, ready to crawl up your spine.

  “That night.” He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, tugging at the tangles as he tried to find the words.

  I was already ahead of him. I breathed his name: “Walter.”

  Phoenix looked at me, then back at Marvin.

  “They took off, but he wanted to go back.”

  “He always got too close,” Phoenix whispered.

  “They hid out across the road, but then she went in and the ceiling caved in on her. They got her out in time, the paramedics, when they finally got there, but it seems . . .” His head tipped forward, hard, like his neck had suddenly stopped working.

  “What?”

  His hand lifted, a finger tapped the hard bone around his eye. “She’s blind.”

  He had stepped closer so by then we were almost within arm’s reach. I wasn’t sure how I’d ever touch him again, how I’d ever find my way back to any life like the one I’d had. Suddenly I was looking around, realizing I recognized nothing. No landmarks. No familiar features.

  “Why did she go inside?” I asked. Only Margo. Stupid, risk-taking Margo.

  Marvin shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Phoenix’s shovel clanged against the wooden porch. “You have to do something. Call the police.”

  “What will that do?” Marvin said. “They’ll arrest her. And us.”

  “And him,” she nearly shouted.

  I looked past Marvin, toward the lake. The water like steel under the bright sun. When I shifted my eyes, transparent yellow spots hung over everything. Marvin had come right up beside me without my noticing. I started to shake and he touched my arm.

  “Christ,” Phoenix said, turning away. I heard the door slam from a vast distance. He asked if I was all right and I told him that I was but I knew I never would be. I would carry those circumstances like the heavy lead X-ray robes they used to make you wear, back when doctors could take pictures of your bones, see everything inside you.

  Thomson cooked the squirrels on a spit in the backyard, and the four of us ate supper quietly, as if after a funeral. Marvin’s fingers held tightly to the tiny bones. I hadn’t seen him like that before, like a small boy. My reflection was a blur in the metal fork, and I kept sneaking glances at Phoenix but she wouldn’t look at me. I saw the hardening of her jaw when Marvin started to talk.

  “We’ve made a difference,” he said. “You should see what’s happening up there.”

  “Haven’t we seen enough?” said Thomson.

  Marvin acted like he hadn’t heard him. “This group threw buckets of blood into seven banks across the city.”

  “Whose blood?” Phoenix asked.

  “Chaos,” Thomson said. “And casualties.”

  “Walter says that,” said Marvin.

  “Thomson doesn’t mean it in a good way,” Phoenix said.

  “And Walter does? His fucking girlfriend’s blind. Look what he’s lost.”

  I pushed a pile of tiny ribs around on my plate.

  “You’re not hungry?” Thomson asked me, and I shook my head.

  Phoenix’s knife shrieked against her plate. Marvin looked up at her. “He’s committed to what he stands for.”

  “Where’s Margo?” I asked, but Thomson talked over me, squinting at the front door like he was waiting for someone to come in. “‘Ideology gives people the illusion of behaving morally and having an identity while making it easier for them to give those things up.’ Vaclav Havel.”

  Marvin stared at him. “Is that how you felt, when you were revolting?”

  “Those were different times.”

  “Yes, you had a whole world waiting, that blissful reality on the other side of the wall.”

  “A different jail cell.”

  “All we know about what’s next is collapse and whatever hard world comes after that.” His words were clear, but I heard a softness in his voice, like his foundation had grown punky, holed by soft rot. “But the band keeps playing as the ship goes down.”

  Phoenix interrupted: “So it’s okay if people die.”

  “No one’s died yet,” Thomson said, like he could see Marvin’s side.

  Marvin stood and his chair fell back, booming against the hardwood floor. I stared down at a shiny island of grease on my plate as his boots pounded upstairs. He went to the room Phoenix and I had been in earlier that afternoon, where the pigeons lived and the other creatures that came through the broken windows, the gaps in the eaves.

  23 Island

  Thomson was crossing the yard when I returned. Consciously planting one foot in front of the other, his robe swishing around him like the rough-edged feathers of a crow. As if he really was a bird, I approached slowly, not wanting to startle him. I caught his arm but this time there was no chastisement. I did not try to stop him. I knew where he was going, where he wanted to be. We walked through the forest, to the bees that had been left behind.

  The remaining hive was toppled. Thomson pulled on me as he rushed into the centre of the clearing. That was it: both sides of the colony were gone.

  “Who did
this?” he hollered, and his voice sputtered into a cough. He grabbed the back of the chair I’d brought out days earlier. My hand hovered around his elbow, waiting to help him. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, watery blood smearing across the grey stubble on his chin, and said, “Your kid.”

  I started to defend you, but he swung toward me, the robe filling with air like the whirling dervishes he’d told me about a long time ago. “This is your fault.”

  “I didn’t do this.”

  “Your neglect did this. Wandering all over looking for what you want.” He poked his finger at me, word by word. Want echoed in the clearing before his left food lifted and slammed down, crushing an angular chunk of honeycomb. I didn’t know how he’d found the energy. “This is where you are, Sandy. Stop looking for ways out.”

  “She’s not a way out. She’s a person.”

  “An obsession.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “A reverie, a fantasy.” He reached for the chair and hung there, his back curved, body starting to sag. “You go blindly into things. You don’t consider the consequences.”

  Phoenix, he meant. I knew he meant her. Grief rose in me like something loosened from the lake bottom, bobbing to the surface. Thomson reached out and his fingers felt bone dry, already skeletal. When he said my name, I leaned awkwardly against his thin arm and cried as he stroked my hair, his long fingers tangling in the knotted ends. Snot bubbled in my nose. Angrily, I wiped it away.

  “I meant the girl.”

  “I’ve considered the consequences. Her dying alone in the woods. You would help her—or you would have.”

  “I wouldn’t keep her a secret. I wouldn’t try to do it alone.”

  Thomson’s gaze wandered to the broken box of the hive, clobbered into splintered boards. He pushed away from the chair and bent to pick up part of a frame, the honeycomb splitting off it, the whole thing covered in honey. When he stood, he spread his legs to regain his balance. The kimono rustled, flapping open so I saw his skinny, naked thighs, a flash of more. I looked away and he glanced down, realizing, and moved quickly to redo the tie. When he stumbled, I reached for his arm and he dropped the frame and half-tied belt and the robe opened wider.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  “Stand still,” I said and secured the belt with a hard knot.

  “Now I won’t be able to undo it. You’ll have to cut it off me. All for fucking Christian modesty.” The last he said loudly, head back, barking into the sky. When he dropped his face to mine, I noticed the brighter blush in his cheeks. His eyes shining like mercury. He stood close enough that I hung upside down in his pupil, a tiny doll.

  “You know, I’ve never seen you naked.”

  “Thomson,” I scolded, and he blinked, bent his head, and then looked up again, and around, as if confused.

  “I love you,” he said, on the verge of begging.

  “I love you too.”

  “Despite everything. Despite what you took from me. Despite your lack of sorrow.”

  “I feel sorrow!”

  “But it was you.” He was yelling again. “You left the soup kitchen, you joined Jump Ship, you planted the bomb, you watched it all happen, and never said no.”

  “Please stop,” I said. I didn’t know how he knew everything because I had never told him. I pressed my hands against the sides of my head, stared down at the wreckage of the hives without really seeing it. The silence throbbed in my ears. I couldn’t believe he knew it all. I couldn’t believe he had never said anything. That we had simply gone on, the whole mess shoved deep inside each of us like the contents of a sunken ship. You, a diver, prodding the weakening hold.

  “Make amends,” said Thomson. “And then choose the prison you occupy.”

  “What about Marvin?”

  “We’re not talking about him.”

  By then he was tired. He struggled to breathe as he gripped my arm. He seemed like he was about to fall over, land in a gangly heap in the sand and tall weeds, so I steered him toward the trail. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you to make the best of things?” he asked as we moved slowly up the narrow path. I stared down at the ground. We were obliterating our own footprints as we walked back to the house.

  Halfway there, he paused, leaning hard against me and said, “If she hasn’t come by now . . .” and for a brief insane moment I thought he meant Phoenix. “You need to let her go,” he finished, and I realized he meant you, my phantom, floating through the dark woods.

  “She’ll come,” I told him with conviction.

  “What do you want from her?” Thomson asked, and if I’d had a chance to answer, I would have said, simply, love. A fantasy of you painting eggs at Easter while the television rattled on, of taking you shopping for your first training bra. The things I had. A second chance. But I didn’t have the opportunity. His breath sputtered out in a barking cough and he kept coughing. Between the demolished hive and home, he laid a trail of oily blood. I helped him onto the chaise on the porch and said, “Hold on, hold on,” sobbing as he clutched at me, his eyes wide, flashing panic. His lips and chin covered in blood. I tipped his face into a dirty towel, rocking him back and forth. “Thomson, Thomson, stay, please stay.” When he died, it felt like all the air left the world, sucked out as his body sank back, like a boulder, like a felled tree, into that other, unknown place. His soul, like a bee, drifting upward. Invisible.

  Time passed. An hour. Two. The light, the forest, the birds moving around me. Thomson so still. Twitching at first for what seemed a long, desperate time, his body expelling its air, the blood settling in his lungs, a sediment he couldn’t choke on anymore. When I was able, I lifted myself up. I went into the house and pulled a plastic bucket out from under the sink. At the lake, the walk long and quiet, I filled it. Carried it back to the porch, lathered soap onto a cloth and washed his face. Rusty swirls floated in the water. I pulled off his robe, tugged his T-shirt over his head. Threw them in a pile to be burned. I cleaned him. Under his arms. Behind his knees. Each slender finger. Everywhere. An intimacy with his body he hadn’t had with mine, or anyone’s for many, many years. I remembered him and Phoenix sleeping together, how odd I’d found it, the two of them sharing the same, square nest. But I couldn’t judge because I barely knew them then. In total, I had known Phoenix much less than a month.

  I pulled the sheets off Marvin’s and my bed and carried them to the porch. I rolled Thomson’s body to one side and shoved the edge under him, tipped him back, and did the same on the other side. An imperfect job. Once I was done, I realized I’d forgotten to close his eyes so I pulled the fabric off his face and found him, staring upward at the sky, still looking terrified from that final, hard journey. I wondered what he saw now, where he was, and started crying again as I closed his eyelids and again covered his face. Out in the dirt yard, the boughs of the Jack pine nodded in the breeze, bobbing over the flaking shingles on Marvin’s shed. The chickens squawked so I stepped down into the yard and scattered the last of the feed. Soon we’d have to let them fend for themselves on green weeds and random seeds, or eat them. I walked away, up the drive. I heard a tinny, echoing drone and followed the sound to the car. Bees were drifting around the windshield. They slipped in and out through the narrow gap of the hood. I paused, turned to tell Thomson that they’d settled in the engine block, and remembered with a lurch that he was gone. The resetting of reality over and over again: he’s gone, is gone, is gone. Aimless, I wandered down the trail to the shore. The boat still out. Marvin a small spot on the lake. My footsteps crunched and cracked against the silence, and I thought of Thomson’s stories: about the last member of a tribe from an island off the California coast who survived on his own for almost twenty years, a woman in the 1800s cast off from her captain father’s ship with the crewman who had impregnated her. For an entire winter, he’d told us, she lived on a sliver of water-bound rock, her lover and baby both dead. “How’d she get food?” I’d asked. He shrugged. “Gull eggs, plankton, whateve
r was close at hand.”

  “But I’m not alone,” I reminded myself out loud, my voice a strange vibration in my throat. The water stretched before me, unresponsive. I walked back home. To Thomson, lying there, the sheets freshly stained from his body.

  Marvin’s shed was locked, with the shovel inside. I wanted to dig, to tuck Thomson safely into the soil and let him leave. That’s what he’d asked of me: Don’t burn me. I want to feed the flowers, not drift off into ether. Uselessly, I tugged on the padlock and then looked around. A pile of bricks stood stacked against the wall. I picked one up and slammed it against the old steel until the lock popped open. The smashing sound boomed through the silence. My ears rang and inside Marvin’s shed the sudden darkness blinded me. I blinked and blinked again until the details came clear: a pile of unravelling yellow ropes, a coffee can of bent nails waiting to be straightened, a stack of magazines on the plywood desk. I flipped through old copies of National Geographic and Mother Earth News that we’d taken from the library. Near the bottom of the pile, a wrinkled paper stuck out. I lifted the magazines to reveal the Jump Ship manifesto, stained with spilled tea and age, the first part taken from the declaration of the Zapatistas, the rebels Phoenix had known as a child: We were born of the night. We live in it. We will die in it. But tomorrow there will be light for those now crying in the night, for those to whom day is denied, to whom death is a gift, to whom life is forbidden. I thought of you. I thought of all the nights you’d had to spend out in the darkness, alone. My eyes jumped down the page: We are the peasants in the king’s streets. He and his guests watch from their narrow castle windows, in between the entree and the dessert course. And farther: The wealthy live for what they can get in the current moment while we are focused on the questions of the future. How to improve life for our children? What is necessary is to hasten the collapse for all so that we find ourselves on an equal playing field. Only then, once we jump ship and swim for new shore, can we begin to rebuild . . . The word repelled me: sanctimonious and even untrue. Marvin didn’t care about that anymore—children, rebuilding, creating a better life. All we worked for was survival, subsistence, hand to mouth. The kind of existence Phoenix had known as a child.