January, 05 | TALes

William and the Bees

William and I watched the bees as they moved in hive and out. Their motion was layered in compounding visuals that my open mind made little order of. The buzzing, silenced by a parting glass, seemed strangely distant, as distant as the sky, or the grass, or anything much outside the arches and buttresses of the tributary museum halls. Each linoleum-path-square, underlay framed images and words of the museum’s most prized acquisitions. The walls around me performed like a cunning trap for the cool conditioned air and the locking out of those outside. In there, we were safe from the missing people who had long since left art for the glare of their televisions. And for those hours, the bees transfixed us, with their purpose, their allure of buzzing and their steady example of the opportunistic motion that is nature.

It was then, during those moments, as we watched the exhibitionist bees, that things began to change. It began without a voice and resounded as a buzz.

Burroughs and I had not spoken for quite some time. Not that I had any particular reason not to, for he was simply a man and at that moment a companion in spectacle, not because the museum was behaving as a sanctuary, but in the beauty of this gallery, it was not the place for chat. To this day, I might swear that we never spoke at all—but in that silence I seem to recall such witness that I can only hope to explain.

We had both observed the opening of his exhibit, a homecoming of sorts for his newest words. But on a modern campus, the lust for words had been left behind for information with motion and information with skin.

Of course first, there were the gawkers of fame who wandered off with an autographed copy of a cultural cliché. They left without a single curious look to his new words and the illustrations that accompanied them. A couple of department heads, appalled by the lack of speech and glory, rushed to the hors d’oeuvres. A few others hurried to the call of their appointments and phones, having made their obligatory appearances. Myself, I had little to do, but to ride my day out inside the walls, smeared in the minds of others’ passions.

And so it was that a mere hour into the show, only a bored security guard, Burroughs and I remained. I had read through his exhibit several times, carefully I had correlated his words against the illustrations and it seemed simple to me. Each reading led me round to the beginning, at which point I would breathe, locate the author and then begin again. In my motion I found certain revelations for his thoughts, strewn loosely across the stability of the walls.

This cycle broke only when he spoke.

“And what do you think it all means?”

And I said, without hesitation, “It is a celebration of friendship between cruel people, yourself and the illustrator. It is a celebration of something you both forgot in your hate. ”

His eyes quickened with pleasure as fast as I lost interest in waiting for a response. I prepared to begin my cycle again, unhappy with a conclusion that would make a creep such as Burroughs smile. He suggested we go for a walk around the museum.

Across the main hall and up a flight, we found the bees. There was no need to go further. We watched, happy in a silence that contrasted the movements of the hive. I thought briefly of the motion in my mind and how it differentiated me from the bees. At the rate they weaved and crawled and performed their very purpose, I too was performing my purpose in all its complexities. It seemed satisfying enough.

Initially, only William stood by me, but as apparitions tend to appear, there was suddenly another, cloaked in a box-head of white. My body could not move, trapped in the uninvited complexity of fear. The beekeepers came. One by one they surrounded us. Their white gloves and cheesecloth clothes robes bulked their forms—and as monster they were. Like ominous troops from a war most cruel, they gathered. The first to appear reached forward and opened the glass like a ripple on a pond.

In that second I was awash in the buzz. It was a revelation and the breaking of silence. William shook beside me, ashamed in the sound. As the bees swarmed over us, I wondered how I could ever explain this moment. I felt a sense of calm when I had the thought, “it’s OK to experience strange things, sometimes."

The buzz, how hard it is to describe the buzz. We had heard that buzz, in our dreams; in the summer air, and the leaving fall. Such awful stories we told about the buzz, as children, as innocents. Such beautiful stories we remembered as adults. We remembered taking off in our sneakers, snarling our sounds as though to make the buzz our own, but its drone was not sustainable in the long term—for we grew much too old to buzz.

But, the bees were the buzz, in their purpose, and their hive. In their honey, in the taste was the buzz, in the flowers they plundered and in blue skies the bees disappeared, buzzing as though tiny model airplanes. In each one of their stings was the sweet pain of the buzz, like the back of a hand, like the memory of the identical ones who never returned to the hive.

And then, each day and with every tick, we grew further from the buzz, from the white honey boxes in the long grass where a lion or two was proposed to roam. From the skies and the smells and our fascination with the yellow and black and their glorious ability to fly while we were rooted to the ground. I often wonder when, before this day, I last heard the buzz.

To my right was a keeper in a dark visor perforated like a net. He was sullen, his head was square; his facial movements were but wisps behind a screen. His leather glove, white and stiff, pushed me aside from the bees. Behind us, a procession, one thousand beekeepers, netted and white. Each beekeeper reached into the hive and pulled out a single bee. In a military style they would turn and crush the bee, for us to witness—with their gloves, a crunching sound from each fist. One by one the buzzing stopped, and we stood shocked.

And one beekeeper remained. He stood back from us, waiting. We both were painfully aware of a presence in the hive, so alone in the hive. One bee remained, and she was the queen. In the most disturbed manner, she buzzed. Her song began with a pitch, and though it never changed, a message became clear. Quietly, in her way, she begged us to reunite her with her bees. Unwilling was the queen to accept the end of the buzzing she had always known and worked so hard to birth.

William ramped out his hand to her, and she crawled free from the hive. He reached out as to comfort her. She moved anxiously in his palm. She spun round and buzzed, looking left and right for the warmth of the striped masses that had kept her safe. She shook violently for the vibrations of buzz that had been known to her as life. Her buzzing increased, looking, longing.

In a moment of beauty, she spread forth her wings and pushed up in the air-conditioned silence. Her majesty flew round but once and landed on the floor in front of us. Her yellow was of contrast to the cold tile and graying halls. She stood more vibrant than the priceless art. An equal distance between her, and we a beekeeper stood, his square head menacing as all hell.

Her buzzing grew louder; more energy cried from her, a giver of life, she was all-alone. The beekeeper menacingly willed her to him. He exhaled death as though a carcass in the summer heat. How I longed to look away.

I felt such desperation—for a single moment in my life I wished I was more than I was. I wished I could will her to come back, to create and birth a new buzz. Amid the shrine of historical creations, I knew she was capable of giving again, of creating. She was the most beautiful thing in the museum, in the presence of fame, and potential and history. In her I found the energy, the buzz, of all I had forgotten. I willed her, motionless, to not go, to come back to the hive. I pictured Williams shaking hand, elevating her to the hive. I pictured her producing, growing thick with bees. William could return her. She just needed to step away, step away form the keeper. William could save her! He was famous, brilliant; he was art.

She circled once; she buzzed sadly, spread forth her wings and crawled, slowly, solemnly to the beekeeper. His white boot stomped down, and she was shattered. She was shattered—the crushing sound echoed through the halls. The sound reverberated of the art, the sculptures and the walls. She shattered without a scream.

William and I sat on a plush bench between two marble busts. We said not a word. We both feared making a sound. You see, it wasn’t so much that we didn’t want to speak, but our mutual desire to never hear again had cemented us like the statues that framed the museum. For him, he desired the death that his age induced—and for me, well, I just couldn’t wait to begin the long cycle of abuse, to forget what I’d heard. To forget everything I’d ever heard. And most importantly to forget her.

But I never stop with my complexities…

One day, in a meadow, on a peaceful day of which too many write about; something is buzzing in a way that I find terrible to recall. It is a sound that is so terrible to remember and even worse to relive. The buzz. The buzz. I have joyfully forgotten how to hear since that museum day, happy in my deafness, and happy in the silence. As for William, I can only imagine the buzz is all there is .

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