Bee-Loud Glade (8 page)

I still wondered at least a few times each day about the voices I had abandoned, my bloggers and message board ciphers. I imagined them getting on without me, living their lives but having no one to tell about them and no outlet for sharing their moments—not so unlike me, alone in the garden, encountering foxes and owls and skunks and keeping it all to myself. Apart from my meals appearing out of thin air, I hadn't seen a sign of anyone since moving in: not Mr. Crane, not Smithee, not the woman I'd spotted sunning herself. I imagined the bloggers' audience waiting, refreshing websites impatiently in hopes of new content, or sending emails and making comments but not getting answers. Some nights, before I learned to sleep in the garden, I lay watching the small screen of sky framed by the mouth of my cave, and pretended it was a computer and I was typing the stars, that they were the text of my abandoned voices, and I drafted blog posts and updates in my head until they spun me to sleep, imagining all the ways they might describe the days I was having, but always falling asleep before finding the words.

It would have been close to idyllic if not for the allergies and the hives. Every time my thighs rubbed together or brushed my balls it was hell, and I walked bowlegged like a bad movie cowboy. But overall it was much easier to accept my new life, to settle into it, than I had guessed it would be. Giving up speech wasn't so hard, not without someone to talk to, and I could still hear all the voices of TV and movies and the web in my head, so I could have conversations anytime I wanted to. I could scroll through the archives of each of those bloggers, recalling the stories they'd told a year or two years or five years before, and that was like having someone to talk to. Everything in the garden was comfortable quickly—except for my clothes—as if it had all been designed just for me, sized for my body, and an awful lot of it had. So when I imagined how my bloggers might write about all I was doing, how they might tell it, I couldn't get far because who wants to hear a story of happiness achieved by dumb luck, without struggles in the way of the journey, without obstacles greater than an itchy rash on some joker's balls?

10

A
fter the incident with the hikers, after I stumbled and tumbled into their campsite, I sat up late by my fire as it burned down to embers and darkness crept into the space left behind. Then a bobbing, blurry bulb of orange flared up and danced in the dark—a flashlight inside their tent, I suppose, and the first electricity I've seen in so long. Seeing that bright glow so counter to the way of the world, against the cycle of daylight and night, filled me with a sadness I didn't expect. I thought of email and movies and television, blenders and car radios and the evil empire of alarm clocks and phones. The light didn't last, just long enough to rummage in a backpack for something or arrange sleeping bags before bed—a few seconds, a blip of illumination—but the shock to my eyes was almost painful after all these years in which I've had only the sun, moon, and stars and my own tiny fire to light up the world. A second sun suddenly risen right here in my garden, and though it burnt out quickly I couldn't pretend it hadn't been there. If it had been any more than a glowing bright blur, if I'd seen it clearly, it might have burned my old eyes right out. That's a thin silver lining for my fading sight.

It burned longer, though, in the back of my mind, where its heat and its light kept me awake long into the morning, listening to the skitter and scuffle of creatures outside and the harsh rustle of nylon and fleece. Murmured words and muffled laughter carried from their campsite into the amplifying cone of my cave, echoing loudly like they were right beside me or camped on the foot of my bed.

This morning they were up soon after I was, and I watched from the roof of my cave as their featureless shapes emerged from the tent's orange bubble as the sun rose behind it. First him, unfolding through the low door like a spring suddenly released from under a weight. Then she unwound herself in a way that made me remember some time-lapse images of a sunflower growing too fast I saw once—source material for Second Nature, but by now I can't recall what I was meant to be learning—and the two of them stretched side by side but leaning in opposite directions so together they formed a tall, skinny chalice with the half-risen sun in its cup.

I say now that they looked like a chalice, but it was really a big letter Y I thought of at the time, their bodies hazy and indistinct, tan with blotches of color I took to be clothes. I've filled in the details in the telling, seeing more in my mind than I saw at the time. Everything looks like other things to me now, shapes without details and without distinction, and it's easy to mistake one thing for another and to see things I don't really see. I might say it makes me visionary, or that my mind's secrets are projected through my weak eyes, but mostly I think it's memory filling in blanks the way it always has done but finding so many more empty spaces these days. Like my mind tells me I watched her T-shirt rise up as she stretched, lifting away from the tiny shorts she'd slept in and flashing a tan, muscled stomach. I didn't see any of that, I couldn't have across such a distance even if it was there to be seen in the beige haze of her moving body, but I let imagination run wild on the shapes of her shirt and her stomach.

In yesterday's fall on top of their tent, when they helped me up, I felt the first touches of human flesh on my own in so many years, and how strange that in all the confusion and chaos I didn't make much of the feeling—I know it was there, I know I was touched, but I missed paying attention with everything else going on. I might have liked to hold on to that sensation, to spend some time thinking about it. It might be a more pleasant subject than the difficult meditations I'll need to make about everything else that occurred, my angry reaction and routine disrupted.

I went for a swim with my flute while they boiled some food on a tiny camp stove. Its burner roared like a jet taking off when they lit it, then settled into a sinister hiss; no wonder they've had no fire so far, with a futuristic contraption like that close at hand. And I'll take this as a good sign they can't stay any longer than their bottled fuel and packed food hold out. Their dependence on those devices, on those supplies, will send them away when their stores are depleted, I hope.

When I returned from the river, after a few hours' reflection on the strange sights and sounds of last night, after working through long, shapeless tunes on my flute as I floated, they had hung dripping laundry on the blackberries. Their bright fleece jackets and thick hiking pants crawled on the bushes—not real fleece, not sheep, but fleece as if shorn from some synthetic creature with tight, purple wool—and I thought of a plane crash and lost luggage exploded all over. Perhaps because the roaring of their stove had already called to mind planes. When I came close I saw branches bent down and breaking beneath the weight of their washing, and unripened berries had spilled to the ground, before getting a chance to be grown or to darken from green to pink and to purple and to stain my fingers and lips and the droppings of this garden's birds.

One of their T-shirts—his, I suspect—had large enough print for me to squint close and read it, to see that it said, “END THE WAR,” but it didn't say which war and it didn't say where, or else it said so in letters too tiny for me to make out. The last time I saw fine print was the day I signed Mr. Crane's contract, and my eyes are too weak for it now. Maybe it's the same war that was going on when I came here, or maybe some other, but I have no interest in knowing—there's no place for that here. There is violence, of course, between animals, but it's the violence of eating and being eaten instead, the violence of staying alive. The animals, the birds and the foxes and bees, go about their violent business when they need to, and they leave me alone. I only mind the never-ending battles between hills of ants if I happen to step in their scrum; the ants only attack when I'm clumsy enough to intrude with a careless misstep. They don't bring the fight to my cave. Even the bees leave me alone for the most part these days, unless I'm harvesting honey. A war in that far-off other world doesn't so much as nibble at my calloused feet, and that T-shirt—its words so large and so loud they would not be ignored—was an unwelcome intrusion.

Seeing their belongings all over the bushes, their campsite overtaking my home—and, I admit, there was some residue of painful shame and resentment left over from yesterday's incident—that earlier anger came back, that unfamiliar frustration and fury. The hikers themselves, for the moment, were out of earshot, and before I could stay my hand it was tearing their clothes from the bushes, throwing them onto the ground, kicking their campsite and its rubble of strange shapes and mysterious objects. I threw a tantrum, for lack of some better word. I grabbed up their shirts and their socks and their presumptuous, invading underpants from the poor berry bushes, ready to throw them all into my fire, to pounce on their tent and stomp on their sleeping bags and bundle up their whole campsite to cast into the river to be washed away. My berries! My bushes! My whole quiet world!

My arms filled with the wrack and ruin of their belongings, and my bundle grew larger and larger as I swept up their things. Strange fabrics and sharp corners and hard surfaces scraped and brushed on my surprised skin. I raged in my head, my thoughts a low, angry mutter that never reached my numb tongue. Then I tripped over something, perhaps the same round shape that tripped me up yesterday when I fell into their tent, and the entire load slipped from my arms and took my flute with it to bounce off and be buried somewhere in all of that junk.

And all of my anger fell away with it; my fists and teeth slowly unclenched as I felt the rage drain from my body and out through my feet to the soil where it could dissipate across the whole garden, spread thin until it posed no threat and all that energy could be put to use. Shame crept into its place, shame at the damage I'd done and my cruel disrespect, shame at my own stupid lack of self-control. All the autonomy I'd learned in this garden, all of that independence, what was it worth if I let other people dictate my most private feelings? How self-sufficient was that?

I crawled through their campsite on hands and knees, looking for my lost flute and trying to arrange things the way they had been, trying to move blurry shapes back to where they belonged. I spread their clothes on the bushes, though perhaps not the same clothes that had been there before, and I tried to arrange their other equipment more evenly over the ground instead of piled in the angry clump I'd constructed. But when I was done, when I'd done my blind best, there was still no sign of my flute, only a sharp tang of detergent stinging my nose from crawling so close to their clothing.

I deserved it, I knew that. I'd earned the loss of my long-faithful flute through arrogant rage and selfish desires to smash up the camp. I'd wanted to tear down their home—albeit a transient one, a tent—and now I'd lost something in it. Disappointed as I was, I couldn't call that unfair, so I stood up and I picked my way out of their campsite and returned to the task of getting my meal. Fluteless, but with a new note blown through me by the Old Man's firm breath. If he had wanted me to evict them, if he had wanted me to respond to their presence at all, he would have told me what I should do. I should have done what I'd done for as long as always, as if those hikers weren't here. Harvesting carrots and digging potatoes, scraping bark from birch trees and picking rose hips and, on a good day, snatching fish from the river.

I spend so much more of my time finding food than I did when this garden was new, and when I was new to this garden. Hunger wasn't a problem while Mr. Crane and his house were still here and my meals arrived as if by magic. Nothing fancy, porridge in the morning and a bucket of stew and a hard loaf of bread to split between my other meals, but those meals kept me fed and they came every day. Simple and solid as my cave and my ratty old blankets.

As simple and solid as me, too, I would like to think, but these unwelcome and angry emotions have thrown me off course. To have been so provoked and pulled so far out of myself—there's no question what I'll spend the rest of today and who knows how long thinking about as I float and I harvest and weed. These hikers are colonizing more of my energy and time than I'd like to admit, and much more of my meditations, but it's me who is letting them do it and it's me who must make it stop and must go about life in this garden as my life is supposed to be lived.

After all that, my attack on the campsite and the loss of my flute, my own shameful loss of control, I was too sick to my stomach to eat lunch at all, so rather than head for my cave and my kettle as I'd intended, I walked toward the beehives to sit on the hill that rises behind them. At moments like that, when my mind is a muddle and focus is hard to find, the droning hum of the hives helps me center by blocking out every sound—something that has become harder and harder now that my hearing is doing double work to make up for my eyes.

On the way to the hives, following the dark wall of the blackberry brambles until I reached the rock where I needed to turn, I heard the hikers approaching from the other direction. I heard them thrashing their way through the brambles, still stomping in heavy boots, and as they came near I heard her ask, “Should we introduce ourselves? How does it work?”

“I don't know,” he told her. “What do you think? It didn't really get into that, did it?”

“No,” she said, and I missed the rest of their conversation because I rushed to turn away and out of their path, toward the bees and their blanket of buzzing—childish, but I had no interest in being nearby and in sight when they arrived at the mess of their camp.