Swarm (28 page)

Marvin left in
the morning. The mattress shifted as he got up, but I didn't open my eyes until the front door closed with a quiet click. I knew where he was going—to find out what had happened at the travel agency, to learn what people were saying about us—and I was glad he'd gone. Talking to him would have brought it all back when I wanted to pretend that the night before had happened to someone else, that other people were responsible. Going to sleep I'd tried to still my mind by focusing on the hiss of wet wood as it burned in the hearth, the sturdy presence of Thomson and Phoenix on the other side of the gap between our beds, Marvin's body held in the arc of my own. I knew I was cornered, but I was convincing myself that I could make that corner comfortable: wallpaper it, drag in a comfy chair, feed the fire, have friends over. Like I still had choices.

I pushed off the slippery sleeping bag Marvin and I had tugged between us the whole night and sat up. Only Thomson was there, sleeping on his side. The thin skin of his eyelids tinted yellow like old paper. His mouth had fallen open, and even from a few feet away I could smell the sourness of his breath. I stood up, pulled on my hoodie, and went outside.

It was cold. A crust of frost shone on the green grass growing around the billboard posts. In the outhouse, I hurried, rubbing my hands against my naked thighs, thinking about what I'd do that day. I hoped Phoenix had a plan, that she'd set me to work so I could move on autopilot, shut down my brain.

Thomson was still sleeping when I went back to the living room so I tried to be quiet as I built a fire. I made a teepee out of kindling, but the paper basket was empty. Walter had burned the rest of the pirate novel the last time I'd been there. He'd burned a lot, even slid delicate prints of red and white roses from the upstairs bedroom into the flames. They were pretty and I'd felt an urge to stop him, but we were all too far gone by then so I'd just watched the petals turn to black with the rest of them.

Near the front door, the map I'd found lay on the floor, fallen from Marvin's jacket pocket. I wondered if he'd seen it as I tore a strip off the western edge, the area I'd grown up in. The ripping sound woke Thomson. He came to blinking, saw what I was doing, and told me to stop.

“I don't care about shitty novels that never should have been written, but maps?”

It was too late. I'd tucked the single strip—a ribbon of small towns and cornfields—into the wooden tent and set it ablaze.

“Let me see.” I carried over the rest of the map and he spread it across the bumpy blankets. Lying on my stomach, I showed him the blank spot where I'd grown up, wishing I hadn't burned it. His finger followed a road from the city, through the land's nearly blank interior to arrive at an island, shaped like a leaf, floating on the edge of a huge bay.

“I know this place. In another life, I visited there.” He described the empty farmhouses of the original pioneers, how they stand in fields all over the island, falling down.

“With Phoenix?” I asked.

He nodded, still staring down at the map.

“We should go there,” I said. “All of us.” It was easy to imagine: the four of us moving into a place where we could plant a huge garden, buy chickens from a local farmer, eat eggs and fresh meat. I thought of the perfume of blooming apple trees, the crackle of cornstalks in the fall. Phoenix and I braiding garlic. Catching fish on sparkling lines. Babies. Beautiful things that seemed a long way away but possible.

Thomson straightened and his back cracked. “Do you know about the Crusaders?”

I shook my head.

“They left France and other places to fight in the Holy Land, but when the Muslims forced them out they couldn't find their way back to their towns and villages, their families. They just wandered until they died because they had no way of knowing where they were.” He handed the map back to me, the whole unruly sheet. I struggled to fold it, creasing it incorrectly so I had to start again. Thomson turned away, went onto one knee like he was proposing. I tried to help him stand, but he pushed me back, one hand sweeping through the air.

Phoenix wasn't in the kitchen. Thomson went outside, and as I followed him with my eyes I saw her, walking across the clearing with two bottles cradled in her arms. She wore a jean jacket, a bright pink hood casting her face in shadow. Behind her, a bank of grey clouds stood in the west like a landmass. The faces on the billboard stared down like gods as she passed underneath them.

“Good morning,” I said when she came in the door. She didn't answer, only smiled, that same thin smile that was like a branch snapping back in the woods. I didn't let the sting stop me. “How did you sleep?” She set the bottles on the counter and pushed the hood off her head with the heel of her hand. She didn't have a scarf on and I saw that her hair was growing in, a slick of black against her skull like a seal's skin. From outside I heard Thomson peeing off the porch.

“Not well,” she said. “But I don't. You?”

I shrugged. “Okay.” She turned away, poured water into a pot, and put it on Marvin's cookstove to boil. The burning gas roared and it was too loud for us to talk. I watched as she searched through Marvin's things for teabags and cups. A final blue flame puffed when she shut off the stove. Thomson came into the room, standing in sock feet, his belt undone, the buckle clattering as he moved forward to claim a cup of tea. Phoenix pushed his hand away. She was using a single teabag for all three cups and hadn't finished.

“What happens today?” Thomson asked.

Phoenix turned to me. “Can you look for something to eat?”

I nodded and assessed the kitchen—a useless green refrigerator, the closed cupboards. In one, I found two cans of sardines and an old apple, its skin tightening into wrinkles. Marvin's food. I wasn't sure about eating it, but decided we had no choice. I didn't say anything about the cellar preserves Margo and I had found, covered with dust in the stone-lined basement and dated. They were decades old. Walter had thrown a few jars into the street, making a mess of corn relish and crab apples, since washed away by the rain.

I set the items I'd found on the kitchen island. Phoenix sliced the withered apple into wedges and I opened one of the cans of sardines and started on the second but she told me to save it. “The hive back at work,” Thomson said while I looked for a fork.

“You know the worker bees are all female. The males impregnate the queen before they're driven out of the hive. The queen lays her eggs and the nursery bees care for them.”

Phoenix bit an apple slice in half. She watched Thomson without reaction, her dark eyes almost cold. She already knew about the bees. I stood to the side, listening, somehow hidden. She slid the sardines over to him, but he ignored them. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his lips. I saw the weakness in him and recalled that he'd been coughing in the night, a sound that had drifted into my dreams, became the strange call of a giant bird.

“It takes a mass of thousands to build the hive society and one or two humans to destroy it,” Thomson said, and his eyes found mine. I dropped my gaze, uncomfortable. “But then they begin again.”

“Hopefully smarter,” Phoenix said, flaking apart the tiny silver fish with the tines of her fork. She lifted a bite to his lips. He looked at her like he was wondering if she'd given him the right answer and then opened his mouth, chewed slowly, and took the fork from her to dig into the tin for more.

After
breakfast I went with them to the diner. We moved through the quiet streets, down the same road I had travelled many times to gather water. It was strange being there without the busy structure of the soup kitchen, an agenda, a list of things to do. Without Phoenix bossing me around. Instead, she moved slowly, like we were passing through the humid, sticky centre of a heat wave. Thomson and I matched her pace. At the restaurant, the plywood Zane had installed over the front window lay scattered like a giant deck of cards. Phoenix climbed through the opening while Thomson and I used the door. Inside, fragments of shattered dishes covered the checkerboard flooring. I felt the crush and slide under the soles of my shoes along with the sticky remains of the soup. Spinach and mushy carrot chunks were smeared over the walls and counter. Potato chunks stuccoed the walls.

“They weren't hungry?” I said. Neither spoke. “What a waste,” I mumbled, thinking of all the people we'd fed with one pot of that soup.

In the back room, the grasshoppers were mashed into the carpet. A few beat helplessly against the glass walls of the terrarium and Phoenix fished them out. We followed Thomson through the open sliding door to the toppled hives. Phoenix opened her cupped hands to let the grasshoppers go and they sprang down onto the sofa bed mattress that had been dragged outside and burned. Hive frames were scattered, the honeycomb loosened. Thomson picked up a piece and looked into its empty octagons. Honey drooled down, the remainder of their winter stores. He caught some with his finger and sucked it off, staring down the back alley that led to the street. It was the first time I saw him like that, his face clenched in anger. I thought that I might cry and I kicked the corner of the mattress, watched the carbon scatter into black dust. I couldn't understand this kind of destruction—personal and pointless, a violent reordering for no apparent reason. I wondered what Marvin would say, but I could already hear his argument in my head: something about people finally getting angry at stop-gap measures, ripping off bandages.
As long as we have these voluntary supports, governments don't have to face the truth of widespread poverty
 . . . Blah, blah, blah. To him it wouldn't be personal. I shook my head to clear it and noticed Phoenix watching me. But when she spoke it was to Thomson.

“Maybe the bees got their revenge.”

“Bees don't understand battle.”

Her voice was quiet: “Of course.”

“It's still possible they found a new home,” he said. A few buzzed around our heads, but there were hardly any, only three or four, and we watched their stumbling flight and knew that they'd soon die.

I
helped them pack. Phoenix found a used garbage bag and we filled it with their towels, sheets, and clothing. Thomson gathered torn books and found the Buddha candle, scarred but intact. I dug through a drawer in the kitchen, pulling out tiny plastic bags full of herbs and spices, while he talked to us about the Roman Empire, how modern scientists had defined its vastness by the amount of recovered objects. Clay vessels used for shipping olive oil and wine discovered on the ocean floor in heaps, so many that the archaeologists stopped bothering to bring them all up. Useful things, he said, and with anxiety I thought of my own lost items, left behind at Margo's and my old apartment, never retrieved. If I'd known that they were meant to last me the rest of my life, I would have tried to go back. I would have collected the items I cared most about: my grandmother's aluminum applesauce maker, the curtains with the embroidered blue birds, books from my childhood like
The Secret Garden
and
Harry Potter
. Stories I could have read to you.

It
was difficult to leave. The restaurant seemed like an empty shell, its fragile inner life killed off. Phoenix moved with her face and body hardened and Thomson seemed to grow even older as we went out the front door and left the soup kitchen behind, another place joining the general destruction. As we walked south, Thomson peered up at attic windows with panes popped out. I knew what he was looking for: the swarm. I wasn't sure if he wanted to talk, but I asked him anyway:

“Where did you learn about bees?”

“Long story.” He paused and I thought for a second he wasn't going to tell me. “In Chiapas, in Mexico, I lived with a family named Luna. My friend Ignacio kept bees the way they do, a traditional way, in a log hive. That's a method we couldn't use back here, in the city, so I had to learn the Langstroth hives, the box hives that you know.” He waved his hand as if physically scattering the distraction. When he spoke again his voice was quieter. “Ignacio taught me about the bees and how they fit in. Ah Muzen Cab . . .”

“Ah Muzen,” said Phoenix, correcting his pronunciation.

“Ah Muzen Cab,” Thomson repeated. “The god of bees and honey. His image is carved into the temple in Tulum.”

His voice faded away. “Was that your father?” I asked Phoenix.

“Grandfather.”

Thomson reached for Phoenix's hand, squeezed her fingers and held.

“When he died we buried part of the hive with him and then I married his daughter.”

Phoenix stared straight ahead as if alert for danger. Over the lake, the clouds had thickened. An antique armchair lay on its side, surrounded by loose stuffing that scudded down the sidewalk as the wind picked up. All around us lay this ruined wasteland that I was fitting myself so snugly inside.
Be careful what you wish for
, my mother used to say, and when I thought of her I felt an ache of pain and guilt layered on top of all the other sadness. My throat burned. I blinked back the heat in my eyes, trying to cool it but I couldn't. My vision blurred and I stopped walking, staring down at the sidewalk, at the long grass working its way through the cracks. Phoenix looked back at me. Thomson turned around. Both of them were staring at me and I waited but they didn't speak.

“What happens now?” I asked, struggling not to cry.

“What do you mean?” Phoenix said.

I gestured behind us. “Will we rebuild?”

It was what I was holding on to: a montage of clips, like in the movies, the four of us working together, making something meaningful. Scrubbing floors. Hammering walls into place. Gathering the bees. Dropping into bed at night, exhausted but content. A family. A solid footing that didn't require impossible demands.