Bee Season (32 page)

By the time she finishes she is slightly out of breath and covered in a delicate sheen of sweat. Never before has she chanted the letters so well, struck so perfect a balance between vocalization, head movement, and breath. She can hear the words of the book echoing in her head, Abulafia’s voice an unconscious blending of her father and Mr. Clean from the TV commercials:
If you should hear a voice, loud or soft, or see any image before you, you have been received by God or His Highest Angels.

She is poised in wait for the promised sign. She feels a sudden wave of resentment toward her father’s books and their secrets, their paths persistently barred. She is on the verge of tears — over her continued permutation failure, over her unexpected and frightening solitude — when three of Abulafia’s words echo back to her, the aural equivalent of a sudden beam of light parting the clouds.

loud or soft

She realizes she has been waiting for a thunderbolt, a booming presence to shake her to her marrow. She hasn’t been thinking in terms of a whisper. She hasn’t been considering the voices of the letters themselves, the soft voices she has known so long that she takes them for granted. The book whose door she has been pounding her fists against has been open this whole time, waiting to usher her in. She falls asleep secure in the knowledge that she is ready to take the next step.

Though Saul has never engaged in anything more subversive than rhyming “four” with “war” during a few anti-Vietnam protests and hasn’t touched a drug in just as long, he can feel his heart pounding as he faces the police sergeant. Saul wishes he had brought Eliza with him. Perhaps proof of Miriam’s motherhood would downgrade whatever the police have in mind to a small fine and a “Don’t let it happen again.” Saul has the sudden urge to own up to the grass he smoked, the acid he dropped, and the slogans he chanted, irrationally certain that the man before him knows it all and is waiting for his admission of guilt as a precondition for his wife’s release.

The sergeant, a lean man with intelligent eyes, opens a file but doesn’t look at it as he begins to speak.

“We got a call from a family in Jenkintown. They were upstairs when they heard an intruder. The husband wanted to go down with his gun, but we kept him on the line until a patrol car arrived on the scene. We found Mrs. Naumann in the living room. She came quietly enough, but it was pretty hard to get her to give up the vase she had in her hands. She’s lucky the husband listened to us or she’d probably have gotten herself shot.”

Saul pales. “My wife hasn’t been feeling well. I had no idea — ” But he stops, certain that his ignorance implicates him just as strongly, if for a different crime.

The sergeant gives a curt nod. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Naumann, I’d like to show you something.”

“When can I see my wife? Is she okay?”

“We’ve got her downstairs. She’s fine. We’ll need to hold her until she can be arraigned tomorrow morning. You’re welcome to see her, but I’d prefer if you’d wait until after I showed you what I’d like to show you. You can either ride with me or follow in your car.”

“I guess I’ll follow in my car,” Saul says, too afraid to ask if he can decline the invitation completely, very much not wanting to be shown anything at all.

They take a long road through an unfamiliar industrial district. They pass windowless warehouses with metal doors, parking lots of trucks and buses, a salt silo guarded by plow attachments waiting for the arrival of the first big snow. They pull into the parking lot of a U-Store-It with a bulging-cheeked chipmunk mascot. Large chunks of paint on the chipmunk’s body have peeled away, the underlying gray sign metal looking like some kind of communicable skin disease. As they exit their cars, a squat man in a Day-Glo orange hunting cap peers out the door of a dimly lit office, sees the sergeant, and waves him on before closing himself back in.

Squat, windowless buildings with sliding metal doors line the dirt lot. Sodium lights flicker a shade of yellow that makes anyone standing beneath them appear ill. The sergeant beckons to Saul as he heads around the corner, to the second row of buildings. He waits for Saul by one of the doors, tossing a key lazily from hand to hand.

“The manager was kind enough to give me his copy,” the sergeant says in a tone that makes Saul feel as if he’s being tested. Beyond the occasional rumble of a passing truck and the electric hum of the nearest light, there is nothing, not even a cricket. Saul’s world feels thousands of miles distant.

The sergeant scans Saul’s face as if reading something there before unlocking the door. It lifts more quietly than Saul anticipated.

“Perhaps you’d like to do the honors,” the sergeant says.

“What do you mean?”

“The light. Why don’t you get it?”

Saul does not like the sergeant’s tone. “Where is it?”

The sergeant sighs in exasperation. “Come on, you know where it is.”

“Officer,” and Saul can’t believe he’s saying Officer, remembers bravely shouting
“Pig”
in college demonstrations as if he didn’t know he was out of uniformed earshot. “Sir, I have never been here before in my life.”

The sergeant shrugs, reaches inside, and flicks a switch. White light floods a storage room the size of a small gym. The silence is immense.

“It’s beautiful,” Saul finally says very softly, in the kind of cautious voice reserved for libraries, museums, and cathedrals. “What is it … all?”

The sergeant looks at him. “You really don’t know?”

Saul shakes his head, perplexed.

“I believe you.” The sergeant’s voice relaxes. For the first time since being in the man’s presence, Saul doesn’t feel impugned. “I can tell you’ve never been here. Sorry if I made you nervous before. Something this size, it seemed only natural your wife might have an accomplice.”

“Miriam did — all this?”

“It seems she did, sir. The family who called her in wasn’t interested in pressing charges. They were more concerned about her health — mentally, that is. We were actually taking her home when she said, ‘I suppose you’ll want to see the rest,’ and took us here.”

“But where did it all come from?”

“It’s stolen. Your wife has been renting this space for eighteen years, always pays on time, best and longest customer. According to her, she’s been taking this stuff for as long, maybe longer. We haven’t had time to inventory yet, but you can see for yourself we’re talking about a lot of stolen property here, more than enough to rank as a felony offense. Although, quite frankly, we’re concerned for your wife’s health as well. This isn’t exactly what you’d call a normal theft case.”

It is impossible to walk without treading on something. The most easily negotiable floor sections are the portions given over to buttons. Pearl buttons of various colors dot spaces between larger buttons of complimentary shapes and hues, grouped together in vague stepping-stone arrangements which, when taken together, remind Saul of pictures he’s seen of the circulatory system. The button paths are only wide enough for one, bordered on either side by meticulous constructions of larger objects that stretch back to the walls of the room, a landscape of unending shape and pattern.

A spiral of shoes of decreasing heel heights cycles from brown to orange as it winds its way to a center of earrings whose shapes and colors form a pattern of stripes and circles in sparkling metal and rhinestone. The shoes are framed by pens and pencils stacked at careful angles to form a free-standing fence of contrasting colors and shapes, the curve of a pen’s tip set off by the blunt end of an unused pencil. An arrangement of pink erasers becomes the flesh of a creature governed by laws of geometry.

The transition from shoe to wineglass is barely perceptible, the shoes as they stretch toward the glasses actually assuming shapes that reflect or contain a wineglass within them. The perimeter is composed of glasses lying lengthwise on the floor, but with the aid of marbles, beads, and shot glasses, the line arches upward in a graceful curve to join a column of stacked wineglasses, brandy snifters, and champagne flutes reaching higher than Saul’s head. Occasional colors in the stems of the vessels form symmetrical patterns independent of their tower, balanced compositions of line and curve that catch and clarify the room’s light. When Saul gazes at the tower, he sees water reflecting the sun, he sees a night sky of stars, he sees the patient, timeless ice of the poles. He wants to stand at the center of the tower, the glass his second skin, its light beamed directly into his body.

Farther on, a hedge of books expands into a miniature labyrinth. Books give way to picture frames, each containing its own mosaic of small objects. Beads and earrings, cuff links and stickpins create their own immaculate order, establish worlds that seem far preferable to the one Saul inhabits. Candlesticks, light bulbs, and salt and pepper shakers alternate with combs and coffee mugs to form an integrated whole, a combination of objects so commanding it is difficult to imagine the objects separate, performing the functions normally assumed of them. All around him, each object presents itself redefined, this its true function, this the reason for its creation. Saul feels the sudden urge to take off his shoes. He places them gently behind him on the button path, wanting to disturb this vision as little as possible.

Hats of felt and straw and cotton and crepe alternate with dinner, dessert, and salad dishes to form a study of circles. Their varying patterns and hues contribute to a larger design of complimentary colors that vibrates when Saul looks at it, requiring him to turn away, feeling like he has been gazing too long at the sun. Gloves and scarves become an ocean of texture and color in which Saul feels he could easily lose himself, their colors cycling so subtly it is impossible to tell when green becomes blue becomes purple.

It is impossible to put his eyes where something does not demand his full attention, a pattern that hints at something true, an arrangement of objects that suggests a forgotten order. Abstraction is equally hopeless. The room’s collections of objects interlock as seamlessly as their discrete selves to form compelling geometries. They are more than patterns. They are reminders. Saul cannot look without recognizing something lost, the room a return to a state of grace he had not known he remembered, a pure existence he suspects only at a fleeting, subcellular level.

Saul is attempting to stave off sensory overload when he looks up.

At first, what he sees seems a trick of overworked eyes. As he continues to stare, he realizes it is no mirage. Suspended from a web of delicate threads hang silverware, hatpins, and peacock feathers, silk cravats, plastic figurines, and artificial flowers. They are strung individually and in groups, arranged to interact with each other as well as to capitalize upon the slightest wind current. Looking back the way he came, Saul sees a swath of motion carved by his path, innumerable objects twisting and twirling in response to his passage through the room. This space is not a passive object to be observed and left behind. It is interactive. Every person who steps inside becomes an object in its perfect order, associating with it in infinite, beautifully balanced ways.

Saul starts finding it difficult to breathe, the unfulfillable demands of the room overwhelming him until the warehouse feels like a coat closet, until his head begins to ache. When Saul starts to cry, it is out of this sense of supersaturation as well as having arrived at a new level of understanding. If he were capable of creating such a vision, he too doubts whether he could resist its pull.

Feeling ill, Saul makes his way back to the entrance.

“I’ve seen enough,” he whispers to the sergeant, who has been waiting by the door.

“I don’t blame you,” the sergeant replies. “I can’t stay more than five minutes without getting a headache. Still, though, it’s something to see. Almost a shame we’re going to have to tear it all down,” the thought of which only makes Saul sicker.

Saul realizes he is still barefoot only after stepping on a sharp pebble outside the door, runs back in to collect his shoes. He feels reluctant to reclaim them, their return to his feet a diminishment compared to the prospect of remaining behind. Saul turns off the light and slides the door closed behind him. The last object to reflect his presence is a feather suspended just above the entranceway. It twirls in the ebb of the final air current left by Saul’s passing. Then it is still.

They are walking back to their cars. Already, in the rocks embedded in the asphalt, in the clouds of the sky, in the way the yellow light casts a sickly pall upon everything, Saul can see a shadow of the room’s order, its patterns implied the way a sculpture hints at itself from within uncarved stone.

“Let me ask you something,” the sergeant says. “Does the word ‘kaleidoscope’ have special significance to you?”

Saul looks blankly at the sergeant, shakes his head.

“Because that’s what your wife called this place. She called it her kaleidoscope.”

It is only as he is driving back that Saul realizes he neglected to call home. Guilt floods him as he imagines Eliza and Aaron sitting by the telephone for hours, waiting. He ups his speed in an attempt to close the gap between himself and his children as quickly as possible.

The house is dark when Saul pulls into the driveway. He expects to find Aaron and Elly on the couch with the television for company, is surprised to find the living room deserted. Upstairs, both Aaron’s and Eliza’s doors are closed, but only Eliza’s has a line of light beneath it. Quietly, Saul pushes her door open.

She has fallen asleep on the floor fully clothed, knees tucked into her chest, thumb in her mouth. Saul is fairly sure she is not normally a thumb-sucker. He kneels beside her, gently strokes her hair.

“Elly?” he whispers.

Eliza murmurs but doesn’t stir.

“Elly, honey, it’s okay. Daddy’s back. Daddy’s going to put you to bed.”

Very carefully, as if handling a fallen baby bird, Saul eases his daughter into his arms. He is surprised at her weight, surprised that such seeming fragility could be so solid. Once he has lowered her onto the mattress, he debates whether or not to change her into pajamas. He knows he would be soothed by such caretaking, feels suddenly protective of his daughter’s body, this one part of the evening’s disorder he can put right. But he knows his motives are selfish, suspects Elly has reached an age where she would prefer to change her own clothes when she awakens. He tucks his daughter in, kisses her forehead, turns out the light, and closes the door behind him.