Beehive Read online

  Worse news: because the brood received uneven care and feeding during the shortage, there were a huge number of weak and deformed newborns. Bees are savage with their imperfect hive-mates. Bees brook no physical imperfection in their sisters, no wounds, no scars, no missing parts. It’s gruesome watching what happens to them, whether it’s mutants, or workers wounded in battle, or even with the drones come fall, when the hive decides they won’t need any more males. The whole hive bands together to weed out inferior stock. They tear at the legs and wings of their victims with their mandibles until the inferior bees have no fight in them. They drop the wounded bees out of the hive for the birds to eat. Doubtful survival for the Control Tower. Clearly we were going to have to rename the hive when I got back.

  I gave a speech at my old high school. My old football coach, who was the vice principal now, called to ask me, and I couldn’t tell him no. But the kids were great, really thrilled to meet me. I told them to work hard and to do with conviction even the things you feel you have to do. There’s something about talking directly to your past that grows you up in ways years never can. Maybe high school reunions are plots by older generations just to make people grow, to force time’s changes out into the bright light. I mean changes other than fat and wrinkles, changes you can wear with pride.

  I felt adult going back home again, a feeling I hadn’t had before. I suppose the reason I hardly ever went back before was that, the times I did, I felt the way I felt when I lived there, reduced to the mercy of my father’s demons. This time back, I brought my own. I took care of my mother, took care of myself, even took care of the kids who were repeating my own experiences. I felt my years and revered every one of them. I’m certain that helped me keep it together when I saw the scene back in DC.

  95.

  I’d been gone a week and talked to Elizabeth every day, but she hadn’t told me about the changes she’d made. She was at work when I landed, so I took a cab from the airport. I was recovering still, plagued by small pains and exhaustion, but renewed by the self my journey backward revealed. I wanted a warm bed, and a warm body in it, but I could wait for the body.

  The bed had to wait too, though. The apartment was boxes, not a lot of them, but enough to realize that Elizabeth had spent some time filling them. Most of the bookshelves were empty; most of the books were hers. The bedroom smelled of women’s clothes. Several tall closet-boxes stood in a corner. I knew what she had in them, and I knew what she was doing. She was leaving me. Elizabeth was leaving.

  I called her, but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come to the phone. I didn’t have the physical resources for rage, but I had the personal ones for patience. No matter. What else could I do but wait for her return and wonder what she thought she was up to?

  “It’s not you, Ron. It’s me.” We were finally together, finally alone. “This past month has been insane, first with the Lebanon-Syria action and then being taken hostage. Now everyone wants to have a piece of me, the press, the Pentagon, the State Department, you. It’s like being take hostage again. I just can’t handle it.”

  “So we’ll go away. You don’t have to handle all of it. We’ll go to an island somewhere, change our names and just disappear for a while.”

  “I can’t. There’s a new initiative in the Middle East, and they want me at the UN to talk it up and strategize. I can hide in New York, just do my work and disappear.”

  “But what about me? What about us?”

  “Don’t make this hard.”

  “Me make it hard? You’re the one who’s leaving! I’m coming home!”

  “I’m going home, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My dad is so lonely. I could tell when he came to Israel, and I’ve been talking to him. At least I can be around for him.”

  “And who’s going to be around for me? My father?”

  “Don’t do that! That’s awful!”

  “Well, who is? What’s so awful?”

  “It was your father’s death that made me realize this was something I had to do. I can’t just let my father slip away. He’s slipping already, and I can’t let it happen.”

  “But you can let me just slip away.”

  “For a while, yes.”

  “What do you mean, a while?”

  “Just because I’m moving to New York doesn’t mean we’re ending it.”

  I glanced at a cardboard box. The red logo blurred to THE END IS UP in my teary eyes. “Looks like the end to me.”

  “This isn’t permanent. I’m not breaking off with you. New York’s not that far away, you know.”

  “So you couldn’t have waited until I got home? Couldn’t talk to me about this? It’s all up to you? Your choice?”

  “I don’t want you to try to talk me out of this. I have to get away for a little while. Nothing else is going to be there later: the work, my dad. But you will — “

  “I will what?”

  “Be there, I hope.”

  “So, what if I move to New York with you?”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “I can’t live with you right now.”

  “You are living with me. You have been living with me.”

  “I love you, Ron, but I owe you my life. You have no idea how hard that is to live with.”

  “You’re right. I have no idea. I can’t think, I don’t understand. I never have and I never will.”

  She kissed me then, deep and dark as a well, and took me to bed. It was like that first time, like we were hiding in a deep, dark well from all the militias and deaths and disappointments the world can throw at you. We dove naked into one another at the bottom of that well, mindless of everything, mindless even that one of the dangers flying overhead could land on top of the well, that we might be trapped in its lightless water, apart together forever. I held Elizabeth closer to me than I ever had before, and in my imagination we were hiding out in Elizabeth’s lightless room in Dahya, in profound night, a secret from all the battles around us.

  96.

  I did go to New York to visit three weeks later. Elizabeth called me — she’d been calling me more than I’d been calling her — to say people in New York wanted to meet me and there was a party and could I come.

  I felt uncomfortable in my best suit, holding my drink left-handed and hiding my injured right behind me all evening. I could see the dollar signs in the drape of the fabric both the men and women wore. Very few of the guests were American, but I still recognized expensive accents in everyone’s mouth.

  Everyone recognized me. They came to pass on their congratulations, but most of the honors and sympathy went to Elizabeth. Few people had more to say to me than “Great job!” or “Big, aren’t you?”

  To Elizabeth, though, they opened conversation. “Has it been awful to adjust after such a harrowing experience?” a grey and wrinkled French woman asked.

  “I’ve seen your father,” an Indian man said. Elizabeth explained later he was some species of royalty. “He seems a changed man since your release, and changed for the better.”

  I did nothing all evening but accompany Elizabeth, reprising my role as her protector. My hands were a nuisance to me. I could tell I wasn’t supposed to touch her, but I couldn’t tell what else I might do with them and not be judged barbarian. The bandage on my ear marked me as a thug, and I felt like one all evening.

  I didn’t feel much better back at the apartment. Elizabeth had moved into the one on the Upper East Side, where I had stayed a month before. It looked the same as it did then, except for her clothes and books here and there. I still tired easily and went directly from my suit to the bed. Elizabeth took off nothing but her shoes. “I’m not tired yet,” she told me, “and I have work to do.” She kissed my forehead and turned the light off. I didn’t even have enough strength left to stew in the dark.

  But I woke an
hour or so later, perhaps from the strangeness of the place. The light was on in the wood-paneled den. I threaded my way barefoot through the street-lighted living room and hallway. Elizabeth sat asleep at the desk, a green glass light shining on her hair, which splayed over the book open under her head.

  I tiptoed over, so I could wake her gently with my touch, but then I saw what the book was: fabric samples, upholstery fabric. She planned to recover the furniture, redesign the apartment in New York, make it her own. I shut off the light and picked my way back to bed alone.

  I’m not hurrying back to New York and, though she still calls, I don’t think Elizabeth lets me know when she’s in DC.

  97.

  A month has passed since that party in New York. My hearing has returned a bit, and all my wounds have mostly healed over. The left side of my face and neck is not nearly so ragged as I pictured it, though I think it still frightens little children. My ear reminds Jim of some magazine photos of ritually scarred African tribes, almost picturesque. I can’t do anything about my face, of course, so I’m learning to wear it proudly.

  Jim and I did rename the Control Tower. I leaned to Dahya or Beirut for a while, but after Jim captured another swarm and returned it to the super, he called the hive the Mutant from Outer Space, and the name stuck. I’m beginning to look at bees like creatures from outer space, or from someplace or time further away than any human being will ever reach. Bees haven’t changed, physiologically, in a million years or so; that’s why you can find rocks with bees encased in them. But they also don’t seem to have the capacity for change, either, as if they just dropped down from somewhere and got stuck. But people, we change all the time, sometimes so fast you can’t keep up. I mean, Jim’s talking about getting married to this new girl, and though I know it’s only hormones for now, one of these days, that kind of chemistry will happen in real life.

  I haven’t gone back to the Census Bureau yet, and I don’t know when I will. I’m on medical leave, but I’m still working, keeping myself entertained by the offers people have been making me. Colonel Harbison himself called and wanted to know if I had any interest in a career in antiterrorism. The offer I liked best came from my father’s company, at the headquarters in Cleveland. I’m waiting for inspiration.

  Inspiration might have just arrived in the form of Andrea Kowalski. After the evacuation she had to spend a few weeks debriefing in Germany. Now she’s back in Washington and called. She wants to see me and she has my packet — the $190,000 I took out of the bank in Beirut. Elizabeth’s father never questioned what became of the half-million he gave me for Elizabeth’s ransom. Maybe he figures I paid it to free her. And maybe I did. In any case, I already lost the lawyer’s card Roger gave me, and I can’t see calling him or Elizabeth for another one. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with the ransom money, or with the advances and royalties my agent keeps promising me from this deal and that. Maybe buy some more land for Jim to farm and just live out that way with him.

  I get the feeling Andrea might be staying in Washington for a while.

  The shape of life always mystifies me. No one seems to have any better idea than anyone else how it’s supposed to be lived. Some people shape their lives into crosses and others into stars or scythes. Some people — like me, I guess — choose something alive. We make totems of our pets, or our families, or our lovers. I chose bees for my totem, and their powerful wings carried me across a giant portion of my life. Football did that for me before, and fear of my father before that. But now, bees are just mutants from outer space, and I don’t know what will carry me from here. I’ve had the thought that I can go it alone for a while, just shape my life by the shape it takes. It used to enrage me that life came with no rule book, no place you could turn to answer even the easy questions. Now that it appears that even the answers are questions, I’m relieved.

  Andrea’s on her way over to the apartment now; Elizabeth lets me stay for the same rent I paid before. I think both Andrea and I wonder if we misplaced our trust because of the heat of Beirut. Now it’s early July and just as hot in Washington, and regardless of my wondering, I will take Andrea out to the tropical warmth of Jim’s farm. There the three of us, and maybe Jim’s friend too, will sit in the copse on the Adirondack chairs, drinking gin-and-tonics, and sweat rivulets in the setting sun. I will breathe in the smell of return — to earth, to health, to home, to self — and listen to the gathering quiet of bees settling in for the night.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1992 by Andrew Hoffman

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-1246-4

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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