Bee Season (38 page)

Aaron waits until the evening before the class bee to drop his bomb.

“She’s not even in the hospital, is she?”

He says it so quietly that at first Saul and Eliza, sitting across from him at the dinner table, aren’t sure they heard correctly.

“Son?” Every word between them now is fragile, could fragment into shrapnel at a moment’s notice. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about my mother,” Aaron says loudly enough that the sound bounces off the walls. “I’m talking about the story you and Elly have made up about her being in the hospital. It would have been easy enough to do. I wasn’t home. You could have come up with anything you wanted.”

Aaron’s voice makes Eliza feel sick. If she weren’t watching him speak, she would swear it was someone else talking, someone whose life had turned to poison.

If Saul feels the effects of his son’s voice, he doesn’t show it. “And what do you propose really happened?” he asks wearily.

“I think she
left
us.” Aaron slams his glass down so hard it cracks. Water runs in a thin stream down the side of the glass and across the table, dripping onto the floor. No one moves to clean it up. “I think she got sick of you and Eliza playing your little games. I think she got tired of hearing you and Elly laughing together and knowing that if she knocked on your door it would stop. I think she got tired and got the hell out. And I think you covered it up because you knew it was your fault. Tell me the truth, Dad. Why can’t you live your own stupid, lonely life? Why do you have to pull me and Eliza into it? Why can’t you just leave us alone?”

The only sound is the water dripping onto the floor. When Saul stands up from his chair, the table shudders.

“All right, Aaron, you want to know the truth? I’ll tell you the truth. Your mother has been lying to you your entire life. The most fundamental things that you take for granted are false. Your mother’s a lawyer, right?”

Aaron nods warily.

“
Wrong.
She hasn’t had a job in ten years, Aaron. The whole time we thought she was at her office, practicing law, she was stealing. Stupid things that weren’t even valuable or pretty. For ten years we’ve been living on her dead parents’ money while she stole things she could easily have paid for. She was very good at what she did, Aaron. She was never caught. You know what finally did her in? She started breaking into houses. Houses, Aaron. That’s when the police arrested her and took me to where she’d been storing it all. But that’s not the whole story.”

“Stop it.”

“She
arranged
it. Into the kind of patterns only a crazy person would make. It made me sick to look at it, Aaron.”

“Please stop.”

“So, for your information, your mother
is
in the loony bin and she’s there because she
is
completely crazy, and I have no idea when or
if
she is ever coming out.”

Aaron is crying silently, the tears incongruous with his deathly still face. Eliza has dried up, her body an empty husk. The moisture is gone from her mouth and eyes. Her tongue is pasted to her teeth; her lips are sealed shut. Her skin has become so fragile she knows it will crumble away at the slightest movement, reducing her to bones and reddish dust that was once her blood.

“It’s not true,” Aaron whispers, but Eliza knows it is, knows that her mother has always been a stranger.

“Not true?” Saul says, and begins to laugh. Not in a nice way. Not so that others would want to join in. “God, Aaron, if you want proof, just look at yourself. Like mother, like son. For the past few weeks you’ve been going around in an orange robe telling me about heavenly planets and rebirth and sniffing the hand you use for your prayer beads like it had been touching a woman, not that you know what
that
would smell like. Why can’t you just be like me, Aaron? When I was your age, I had friends. Real friends, not religious freaks who only saw me as one more body to sell flowers in an airport — ”

At which point Eliza begins to scream. At first there is just sound, like the sound a small child might make if it were trying to run away from a frightening animal much bigger and faster than it was. Even-tually there are words.

“Please stop it, please stop, please, Daddy, just leave him alone,” but the words are slurred. It is somewhat difficult to make out.

Saul emerges from his indignation to shattered glass, the dripping of water, and the faces of his children.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers, moving to take them both in his arms, but Aaron is all motion, his palm slicing through the air to slap his father across the face before his long legs propel him from the table and into the hallway. Eliza can feel her father’s arms crushing the dry shell of her body, can feel herself disintegrating in his grasp. He holds her so tightly she can feel the pulse of his veins, can hear the tide of air feeding his lungs. Somehow, when he asks her if she is all right, Aaron’s hand outlined in red against his cheek, she manages to find the strength to tell him what he wants to hear.

Saul has gone to bed early, advising Eliza to get a good night’s sleep to prepare for her big day tomorrow. Aaron has been chanting for hours now, the words fast and dangerous, each one honed to a sharp point before leaving his mouth. Through their shared wall Eliza can hear him, a bicycle without any brakes. When she knocked on his door, he just kept chanting, an endless tape loop without a stop button. It was at that point that Eliza decided to go into her father’s study, to fetch the book, and to bring it back to her room.

She doesn’t worry that her father will miss it; he is too distracted to note its absence. Besides, the comfort the book provides outweighs her fear. Eliza strokes its cover with the unconscious tenderness of a mother. Its soft leather is soothing to touch. Its Hebrew no longer intimidates. The angled alphabet beckons like the fairy tale forest in which her happy ending lies.

The sound of her brother’s chanting fades as Eliza empties her mind. Tonight, instead of closing her eyes to await the word that will guide her into permutation, she is drawn to the pages of
The Life of the Future World.
The columns of Hebrew erase time, their own shapes unaltered by history. Eliza could be in 500 B.C. Jerusalem, in the shadow of the Second Temple; she could be in the stone city of Sefat in the 1600s, in a synagogue with a ceiling the color of the sky; she could be in thirteenth-century Spain, Abulafia at her side. In all those places the word she chooses would be the same, its angles and curves unaffected by diaspora, inquisition, or age: אוֹך, Hebrew for light. Eliza is drawn to the word’s last letter, resh an ancient signpost pointing the way toward transcendence. She begins to explore its combinations with her pen, chanting with the vowels Abulafia has taught her, his gift across time.

Ah-va-reh, va-reh-ah, reh-ah-va.

She watches her hand move across the page. Her hand and voice are working in such harmony that it seems her mouth is extending through her arm to the very tip of her pen, the letters the physical embodiment of her voice. She is not consciously aware of how many letter combinations she has written, or how many remain. The exploration of אוֹך is a journey across rolling terrain, traversed to the rhythms of her breath and blood.

Her voice has never been so sure of itself, so grounded in every syllable. As she continues, she is no longer certain whether she is chanting aloud or in her head, too filled with sound to tell. Her body has become a network of invisible strings, each letter resonating according to its own secrets. Sympathetic vibrations set off by the letters in quickening succession build within her until her entire body is humming. Eliza can sense her skin producing sound through its pores, a frequency so low she can only feel it, music that sets every nerve tingling until she is no longer aware of the floor, the air, her clothes, her room, the pen that has dropped from her hand.

Warmth floods her body until she glistens with sweat. Sweat pools at the corners of her eyes, the cleft between her nose and upper lip, the hollow of her neck. It runs down the line of her spine and the curve of her stomach. It fills her belly button. Were she to taste it, she would find it thick and a little sweet, her body turned honeycomb.

The buzzing of the letters fills her head with light. She can feel her eyeballs vibrating in her skull as words beam at speeds too great to hear, making themselves known at the center of her chest instead, within each beat of her quickened heart. There is no possibility of extraneous thought, no mental distance with which to regard what is happening at a safe remove. Each passing moment composes Eliza’s entire universe, no room for the contemplation of past or future. Eliza’s body begins to tremble. Her body sinks to the floor, the convulsions of her arms and legs completely separate from those of her neck and torso, each part of her an instrument played by a different set of frantic hands. Eliza begins to know fear.

The words that start streaming into Eliza’s head come from a source beyond her recognition, at speeds too great to control. She is no longer producing the words but receiving them, a mute vessel scarcely up to the task. Every language that is or ever was resounds in the small chamber of Eliza’s skull, the syllables of long-forgotten words beating against her brain like something buried alive. Somewhere deep inside her head, in a place far beyond the realm of ordinary sensation, Eliza feels something collapse.

Pain arcs from her scalp to the soles of her feet and carves inward until it strikes marrow. As tears stream from the corners of Eliza’s eyes, she feels certain she is dying, but even this knowledge drowns in the torrent of words in her head, calling to her, shouting at her, pleading to be heard. The words are all abrasion and rough edges. They grate at the back of her cranium, steady as sandpaper. She can feel the convolutions of her brain being smoothed away, reduced to a warm, thick liquid that plugs her ears. Something heavy and hard is taking its place, something that isn’t the right shape for her skull.

Eliza is unsure whether her eyes are open or closed when she sees the unfolding. A shape, its surface teeming with figures and images, is growing steadily larger, devouring the space around it as it spreads. Its surface shifts at speeds too fast to catch. Eliza thinks she discerns animal and human forms, crawling insects and crashing waves, but then realizes these are only meager attempts to lend familiarity to shapes that defy experience or sense of scale. What seems like a tree could just as easily be a feather, a lung, a network of rivers stretching across a continent. The shape expands until Elly is just a speck in its shadow, it having grown too large for her to see anything but blackness.

It becomes impossible to discern sight from sound, the two senses melding at an impossible pitch. The heavy, hard thing that came into her head too large has taken root. Desperate to get it out, she begins to shake her head violently from side to side. She cannot feel the movement, only hears a slight sloshing sound: a cup of sea water inside a plastic bucket.

Even as Eliza continues to chant, she can feel the muscles of her lower face clenching and unclenching as she chews her tongue. She can feel her jaw straining as it opens and shuts. There is a metallic taste in her mouth. The pain in her jaw muscles and the pain in her tongue become indistinguishable. Eliza no longer hears the sound; she inhabits it, lives in a small, neglected room that has been all but forgotten inside its massive bulk. She thinks she feels liquid trickling from her ears. She can feel each tooth as it bites into her tongue, but her tongue feels nothing. Her tongue is that of a dead cow, lying huge and slack upon the kitchen counter. She does not feel the urine pooling beneath her and mixing with her sweat. Its heat is canceled out by the impossible heat of her skin. She is willing to die for this to end, wishes she could die so that it would be over. As if in answer to her desperate prayer, the words soften, turning first into the clatter of insects, then to the rustling of leaves, then to water seeping through soil, and then to nothing.

The quiet is a benediction. The world, and she within it, is still. It is the stillness of an uninhabited coast at ebb tide, of the womb in the moments presaging the first beats of a tiny heart. In gratitude, Eliza finds herself pronouncing the first six triplets of God’s name.

The sounds are drawn out of her slowly, molten glass at the end of a glassblower’s pipe. She expands with every syllable. Slowly, delicately, she stretches beyond her bones, beyond her skin. She had never perceived the extreme confinement of life before, when she was smaller than mountains and oceans, contained by her impossibly tiny body. She has grown large as the shape that dwarfed her with its expansion. She knows that the shape has a face, that everything depends upon the glory of that face’s unveiling.

Eliza can feel the rise and fall of her breast above her heart, the stretch of her veins as they pulse with her blood. These are the manifestations of her body’s desire. She exists only in relation to the face and its eminent appearance. She is halfway through the first six triplets. The knowledge that she will behold the face only after she has spoken the eighteenth syllable of God’s name does not cause her to quicken her pace. Each letter must be born of her breath with the same slow inevitability of water carving stone. Part of the joy of each interval is this delicate slowness, the miracle of the final moment having been brought imperceptibly closer.

She never knew how much one syllable could contain. Each sound is ecstatic with possibility, an element from which all else springs. Pain has been replaced by a sense of release, locks and fastenings at last unbound, her body an infinite sail finally unfurled. A lifetime ago the shape seemed too large. Now she and the shape appear before each other as she speaks the final syllable.

Time stops.

In the split microsecond that follows, it is impossible for Eliza to see as much as she does. The shape’s face is every face ever formed. Its surface teems with infinite human and animal possibilities, waves of flesh that crash against each other, consume each other, overflow and replace each other in perpetual transformation. The faces of the young, the old, the dead, and the extinct. Beautiful faces and faces deformed. Fur and flesh and feathers and scales. All simultaneous, all fulfilling the best and worst of their natures. She is mauled and licked clean by a lion. She is bitten by a cobra even as she feels the wonderful coolness of its skin. She is choked and crooned to, slashed and kissed, stung and cuddled, fed upon and fed. It is impossible to discern pain from pleasure, sensation devouring sensation. It is a microsecond that lasts a million years. Every cell is taxed to its limit, synaptic messages exploding along passageways blown clear away, the dam broken, sensation flooding the towns and drowning the townspeople, carrying away forests and herds and babies in their cribs.