Bee-Loud Glade (14 page)

As I wended my way, the world was somehow both asleep and abuzz with the energy of evening coming into all corners, the energy of waking and stretching and setting out for the night. Then I saw a shape, a man-sized shadow or perhaps an animal in the last of the light, but something slipped silently through the garden ahead of me. I almost followed, I almost hurried for the first time since the bees had attacked, which must have been months, but whatever was moving had moved out of sight. So I walked on at my untroubled pace, as if I hadn't spotted the swift, dark suggestion of something.

19

I
haven't counted the days, but by now those hikers must have been here a week. I come out of my cave every morning wondering if their tent will be gone, folded and ferried away while I slept, but it's still in my garden as orange and bright as before. Each morning its zippers fall open, and they emerge like chrysalides from a dewy cocoon, as hazy as the real things would be while gauzed in the goo of rebirth. One then the other they push through the flaps of their pitched vestibule, glistening in lingering mist. The sun must warm their quarters until they awake with no choice but to depart the hothouse it becomes. Now that departure is part of my morning routine: I climb my cave, I watch the sunrise, and I wait for the hikers to show their blurred shapes.

I suppose I'm not really watching the sunrise these days, so much as I'm remembering those I watched in the past. Every morning is fogged in for me, arriving as blurred bands of color—first blue and purple, then red, and finally orange. It's pretty enough in its way, but in the old days I enjoyed the occasional morning of mist because it showed me something new, it refreshed the world, and the next clear dawn I watched meant that much more because of the change. But now there is no change coming, no change for the better, at least. How long will it be until I only know the sun's risen because I feel its warmth on my face? How long until every sunrise, each morning after the other, is insufferably the same? Without those variations of light and shade, my mornings in this garden might become as mundane as they were when I worked for a living.

When Mr. Crane was still here, was he in the habit of waking up early to watch me come out of my cave, as I watch the hikers emerging? Maybe I was part of his own morning ritual, as they have become part of mine. Perhaps when I performed my inept tai chi or sat in my tree house, it was Mr. Crane seeking fresh sights like I marvel at their many changes of clothes—different colors and shapes every morning, it seems. When my own drab, gray tunic wore out long ago I gave up wearing clothes altogether, and now an entire catalog has come to me like a modeling show. And if their clothes can be new every morning, what else? There might be unfamiliar flowers or unknown birds turning up but unseen all the time.

For all I know, these two aren't the same hikers I saw yesterday. Perhaps there's a new pair each morning, a rotating troupe of performers who all look the same to my eyes.

This morning I heard them stumbling through brush on the edge of my glade, and I could tell they were plucking mushrooms from under bushes and from around the shade-spreading trunks of broad trees. The mushrooms they must have gathered, the ones in that part of the garden, are toxic but not badly so; those poor culinary free spirits will have upset stomachs, they'll vomit and squat with diarrhea for the next day or two, but they'll survive and be no worse for wear. They'll ingest the poison and their bodies will purge it and they'll have learned something about mushrooms and forest foodstuffs in the process, something I once learned myself the same way.

I could have run down the hill toward their hunting grounds, waving my arms and hopping about to prevent their poor dining decision, but why? For all I know they were gathering poisons on purpose. For all I know they have good reasons, and my intrusion would have spoiled some scheme I'm not privy to. And if I did intrude, if I did try to stop them, those hikers might have ignored my mute warnings, resented my intrusion as I resent theirs, and gone on gathering fungi for reasons untold of their own.

If the mushrooms were deadly, if they were dangerous beyond mere discomfort, I might have been more inclined to step in. But I know they'll survive so I let them be, and once they get past being sick they'll know more about the world than they did when they woke up this morning.

I sat on my cave and listened in on their progress. They plowed through the brush, moving toward and away from my perch, louder and softer and sometimes calling out to each other with joy at the discovery of a larger than average prize—how could I have denied them that triumph, the only joy they'll get from that harvest? And when they'd decided they'd gathered enough, I suppose, they went back to their tent for a minute or two before walking away toward the river.

I climbed down to head for the water myself, a bit later than usual because I'd been listening to the hikers out hunting, but not too far off my routine. At the mouth of my cave, I reached for my stick where I'd leaned it at night when I limped off to bed, but what I found was something else: still the same stick, for most of its length, but the sharp, stabbing top was now crossed by a short length of smooth wood, and wrapped with strips of soft orange fleece. I set it under my arm and took tentative steps, and instead of the uncomfortable, unaltered walking stick I'd been using, a stick that had forced me to adapt my hobbling to suit its shape, this perfect crutch bore my weight as if that's all it existed to do. It instantly lessened the pain in my leg and let me limp without jarring my knee as I hobbled downhill to the river.

It was an unexpected gesture, to say the least. The birds and the foxes provide entertainment, but it's not something they give to me so much as something I steal. Likewise the bees and their honey. But to actually be given something, a gift, hasn't happened since I was given the gift of this garden.

Picking my way toward the water, I wondered about those hikers and why they're here. For the first time I asked myself who they might be apart from “the hikers” without any names, those blurry shapes in my befogged garden. What are
their
stories? I asked my scribe, and I asked the Old Man, but neither had word one to tell me.

20

I
was floating eyes-closed on the river, playing the flute that had reappeared in my breakfast basket a few weeks or months after being taken away. No explanation, no specific request, but the flute came back to me so I went back to playing. Feet propped on my faithful tree, I bobbed on the water, drifting to this side and to that but always anchored against the current. And I blew and I blew on that flute until I made noises that sounded like notes, noises I could repeat on purpose, at will, rather than shrill random squeaks. Even that meager, marred music was more than I'd expected to make, so it felt like success.

I won't say I was getting good, but I managed to pick out a few basic tunes like “Happy Birthday” and “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” I'd begun working my way through “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy,” which was coming along slowly but surely. So I fluted and floated through the afternoon, and the river stirred me about on its surface as the wind stirred the water itself. Then I felt Mr. Crane's presence nearby. He didn't speak or make any sound that I heard, but something told me he was there on the bank, so I looked up and saw him, dark suit and arms crossed over a ruby red tie as he watched me float on the river he'd made. Perhaps his shadow had fallen across the water and on my eyelids, or perhaps something else had let me know he was there, but as soon as I knew he was watching and waiting I swam in toward shore, holding my flute overhead and out of the water. My tunic was on the sand behind him, and it seemed rude to charge nude from the water, to rush past him and put it on and only then be prepared for conversation, so I stayed in the water up to my chest near the shore. To an observer, had there been one, we would have looked like a man consulting a mystical fish the way it happens in children's stories.

He had the long green stem of a dandelion in hand, and I waited for him to start speaking—I assumed he was going to speak; why else would he be there? It had to be something important to come down in person instead of sending a note or using his speakers. I watched the stem weave through his fingers, wrapping around and around until there was no more of the plant left in play, and as he squeezed his knuckles together, glistening white dandelion milk oozed out one end of the stalk and hung suspended and shining over the sand. I waited for it to drop, but it didn't while in my sight.

“In my line of work, Finch, there are surprises. No…let's not call them surprises, surprises sound like something you aren't ready for. Let's say there are... opportunities. Opportunities you weren't expecting, like the one that delivered you here, to me.”

He paused, so I nodded. It seemed like what I should do.

“Success is about waking each morning and inspecting the world, knowing what's changed overnight and how you can best take advantage. Adaptability, Finch. A political feud becomes an armed conflict, a bombed neighborhood needs rebuilding. All those things you see on the news but it's too late by then. If it's on TV, I guarantee you that everyone important already knows and has made their move, and opportunity has passed you by.”

I would have liked to get back to my swimming and flute, back on my back in the water with my eyes closed and the sun on their lids, wiping my mind clear of the sorts of things Mr. Crane was talking about and, sure, all other sorts of things, too. I'd seen and heard so little of him, my employer—only a few visits since I'd arrived, far fewer than I'd expected from someone who paid me so much—that sometimes I forgot he was up in the house, and I forgot for long stretches of time that he owned the garden and that my home was in someone's garden at all. But I tried to look interested, I tried to look concerned, I tried to look like an eager employee in a very important meeting, which I suppose our riverside conversation was despite my being naked and underwater while it took place. If clothes make the man, I don't want to wonder what that made me.

“It's not only noticing changes before someone else. No, it's putting those changes in motion, making them your own as fully as if they'd been your ideas from the start. Capitalization, Finch. Capitalization.”

He spread his fingers, and the crushed stem split in several places along the span of his hand.

“They won't always be the right moves. They won't all pay off. Of course not. But it's the move that matters, Finch—the bold gesture, the confident stroke. Men at my level understand that. We take that for granted. But if other people don't realize what matters most, if someone who's never moved at the fast pace I've set can't see the point in what I'm doing, is it my job to explain it to them?”

He paused, the way his wife always did, leaving room for me to not speak.

“No! No! Why would they, the myopic bastards? If they had any vision they'd be making the world keep up with them instead of slowing it down. They would offer a vision of what things might be instead of clinging to ignorant notions of what the world never was.”

With the last word he hurled what remained of the dandelion onto the sand, but though the force in his arm's motion was evident, the light flower dropped as slowly as if it were floating on a calm pool of water. Quietly, as if to himself now, he said, “It's only creative destruction. It's only what makes the world run.”

He looked down at the stem, then said, “Oh, and Finch, you should know steps were taken to redress the disrespect shown to your work here by the winterization contractors. It won't happen again.” He slid his hands into his pockets and kicked at the dirt with a leather shoe the color of dried blood. “It's always unfortunate to work with those... those less professional than ourselves, isn't it, Finch? It's always a test of our patience and of our resolve.”

Then he crossed his arms over his chest and paced back and forth on the bank, parallel to the flow of the water, muttering under his breath while I knelt on the bed. Still talking to himself as much as to me, perhaps even more to himself, he said something about hunting mushrooms, about how it looks to someone who hasn't done it himself: the patience, the creativity, some other necessary qualities I couldn't quite hear as he walked back and forth, in and out of earshot. He didn't actually tell me to do anything, but I'd long ago spotted the mushrooms sprung up overnight, every night, all over the garden each morning. So I took his mumbled remarks as an instruction for what I should do with my time. And I couldn't be sure, I didn't quite hear, but I think he thanked me for our conversation.

Then he turned away from the water and headed uphill toward the glade and my cave and his own house beyond, leaving me to float away from the riverbank back into the deep run of water, back to my flute and back to my back, and the rest of the afternoon passed without interruption save for a bird taking a crap on my head from a branch overhanging the water (and it wasn't the first time for that, and there was no one to notice the shit on my head, so no reason to do something about it; the river would wash it away).

Early the next morning, I set out mushroom hunting. I lay on the ground where a cluster of orange-spotted white mushrooms huddled by the trunk of a tree, and I watched them for an hour or two, maybe longer, trying to imagine the way they might think. They didn't move much, but I'm fairly sure I saw one of them grow; I saw it grow, or else I watched a mushroom move that wasn't really a mushroom at all— if beehives and bird nests could be cameras and speakers, why not a microphone disguised as a mushroom? A few months earlier I might not have noticed a mushroom growing, but I'd become attuned to a slow-moving world. I'd definitely never noticed any growth in the wide range of mushrooms produced by Second Nature, companion pieces for bushes and trees and fake fallen logs and often just the right touch for a convincing lobby display.

I watched, and I waited, and I discovered that a growing mushroom likes to be dwarfed by something taller beside it, likes to live in that something's long shadow. These particular mushrooms, the whitish ones with orange spots, depended on the tall, solid tree they'd grown against (I think it was a maple, because it dropped helicopters, and its leaves looked like the logo on bottles of pancake syrup) for its protection and shade and, I assumed, nutrients and water supply. Sometimes they were also half-covered by grasses and moss, close to concealed and easily missed by an eye not looking for them.

So I learned a lot about mushrooms and their shy lives. I learned that they're quick to cower and quick to hide, that they're willing to keep quiet and small so long as they're left to grow—not too tall! not so big!—in relative peace. They prefer dull, drab colors, colors that won't grab attention, and the ones with bright tops, orange domes and red-speckled saucers, I guessed were more often than not only setting a trap to keep danger away from their less eye-catching kin. Those, I thought, were the mushrooms most likely to be poisonous—the ones that grabbed all the attention.

Thinking like a mushroom came quickly to me, and it worked. In the first place I looked, brushing aside a soft curtain of moss and weeds, I found three perfect mushrooms crouched in the shadow of a large rock. They were so close they were practically—but not quite—touching each other, and as soon as I leaned close and disturbed the air around them my nostrils filled with the sweet scent of secrets, of wine cellars and old canning jars and the thrilling surprise of turning a stone to find a bustling community of potato bugs and millipedes thriving beneath. The excitement of life where it wasn't expected. Gently I plowed a small circular furrow around each mushroom's base with my index finger, then snapped their stems off as far below ground as I could. I don't know why, that just seemed like the best way to pick them. It seemed important to keep them intact as much as I could, at least until they were eaten.

My first chosen mushrooms were the color of clouds, not cotton-white clouds but creamier ones, clouds when there's going to be or has been a storm and the sky isn't gray but it isn't blue, either. That kind of cloud. That kind of mushroom.

I found another set of three almost immediately, then a few more, and before the sun had crested the peak of the sky my wooden soup bowl was piled with a whole morning's harvest, and I decided those were enough. What would I do with more mushrooms, me alone in my cave? I could only eat so much in a day, and I already planned to pick more the next day or the next—I had the knack, and neither the mushrooms or I would go anywhere. So I strolled slowly back through the trees with the tiled roof of Mr. Crane's house visible through the leaves, and lit by the sun in a rusty red glare.

That evening, when my soup came, a knife arrived with it, and I knew it was for slicing my mushrooms; someone had noticed my project that day. I shaved them into my pot over a small, slow-burning fire, and as they roasted the rich smell filled my cave and my stomach growled. The food Mr. Crane's kitchen provided was delicious enough, and always hearty, but it was exciting to prepare food I'd gathered myself—unlike the meals I'd made long ago in my apartment, this wasn't just something to fill up my body and keep it upright, an experiment in ingredient mixing, but food and aromas I'd actually earned through my own hard work and through Mr. Crane's, too—he'd built the garden, he'd sown shadowy spots where mushrooms might grow, so my harvest was also his. I nearly walked up to the house to ask him to join me, but no, that didn't seem right.

At best I could have silently held out a mushroom, roasted and darkened and steaming, and we could have eaten together. But if Mr. Crane wanted mushrooms, mushrooms picked from his own backyard, I knew he could have—and had he already?—gone and gathered his own.

And it was a good thing I resisted that impulse to share, as things turned out, because only a short time after eating—not quite half a log had been burnt in the fire—my stomach knotted and cramped and my legs went rubbery and I collapsed on the floor of my cave. My belly churned and moaned and twisted, tighter and tighter like a wet paper towel that refuses to break in strong hands, and seven times I felt myself ready to retch and crawled to the mouth of my dwelling, only to have nothing come up. Until later, when it came up and showed no signs of stopping.

I lay for what I later estimated to be three whole days on my pallet, three long, painful days without pause, moving only to drag my wretched bowels and bile a few yards from the cave. As always my meals appeared in the wall nook, and at one point I swam up through the murk of my sickness to surface in the dark of my cave, and I saw Smithee sliding a tray of food into my niche. At last the mystery was solved, but I was too mired in misery to care. My eyes were hardly open, and he must not have noticed that I was awake, because I watched as he wrote in his notebook and poked through the pinecones and stones and oddly shaped leaves I'd collected, all stashed in one nook or another; it looked like he was making a list. Then he pulled out a camera from his wonderful pocket, not the same camera he'd had by the river but a video camera smaller than I'd ever seen, and he swept it around the walls and the floor of my cave and even over me deep in my blanket nest, all the while mumbling to himself (and, I suppose, to the camera's microphone) so softly I couldn't hear what he was saying.