Swarm (12 page)

“None for me,” Phoenix said as he dribbled the gold liquid into the cups, but he ignored her.

The firelight lit the whisky like maple syrup before Phoenix closed the doors of the woodstove and it dulled into hardened amber. I sipped. My tongue stung. Thomson lifted his glass.

“
Na zdravi
.” He looked into my eyes before downing the shot. “Have a toast with us,” he said to Phoenix, but she shook her head and stood, sliding her hands into the deep pockets of her cargo pants, warming her back on the stove.

“More for us,” Thomson said, but he didn't touch her mug. It sat there, actually, for days, trapping dust and even a couple of fruit flies as the winter warmed to early spring.

We drank in silence. The liquor buzzed in my mouth. Finally, to fill the quiet, I pointed at the book. “Is that good?”

“Very,” Thomson said and picked it up. He read aloud to me, but all I heard was something about not trying to walk out blindly when you're lost in the woods, a rule I already knew. As he continued, I scanned the spines of other books lined up on a shelf built out of lumber and crumbling red bricks.
Small Engine Repair
, the
Tao Te Ching
,
Fifty Years Among the Bees
. I wasn't listening. In one corner of the room a low table held a dusty brown candle shaped like a fat Buddha and a brass bowl full of rocks. Beside it sat a television set, a Star of David drawn in the dust that coated the screen. On top was a glass box filled with foliage. A terrarium. I peered toward it, curious about what was inside, but I didn't want to break the spell of the cozy room. I was glad that I had come. I almost expected Phoenix to ask me for help with a chore, some sewing or breaking furniture into burnable wood, or for her to start playing again, filling the air with that odd droning sound. I thought it would be that easy for me to move into their world, that there wouldn't be any questions, that my assistance would be unconditionally welcomed, that I would simply make myself at home.

Instead, Thomson laid his book down, leaned back, and I watched the candlelight reflect off the buttons on his sweater as he spoke: “Marvin said you lost your job.” I flinched. I wondered what else he had said. Did they know we had slept together? They both listened as I told them the basics: about Parthenon, about being laid off, about not being sure what my future held. I considered telling them about what I'd done that day but I didn't.

“So that's why you're here,” said Thomson.

I nodded and stared into the smooth central hollow of my drink.

“Why here?” Phoenix said, sitting down. She sounded impatient, tired. I felt as if I was one of a long line of applicants interviewing for the same job. “I mean, what do you imagine?”

“Living here, I guess. Working. You know I'm a hard worker.”

She nodded. “I also think you have a fantasy that's far from the reality.”

“I don't have a fantasy.”

She stayed silent. Of course she was right.

“There's a quote,” Thomson said. “‘Flies collect on a wound.' That's Rumi.”

“Are you Buddhist?” I asked.

“Rumi was a Sufi.”

“Oh.” I felt stupid. I looked down at the floor, at the carpet marked with black burns from fires that had come uncontained. I didn't understand.

Thomson leaned back and for the first time I noticed how skinny he was. Veins bulged in his forearms like blue roots. “This is a hard path. Why this path instead of another?”

“I don't know,” I said and then decided to tell them the truth. “I don't really have anywhere else to go.”

“Not with Marvin?” He watched me. Phoenix drifted one hand through a basket beside her, pulling out a sewing kit and a sock. I shifted in my chair, set my empty cup on the floor by my feet.

“I guess I'm with him,” I said because they'd probably heard. They probably already knew. My face grew hot. “If that's what he wants.”

“What he wants?” Phoenix asked.

Thomson sipped his drink.

“Why don't you like him?” I blurted.

They glanced at each other. “That's far from true,” said Phoenix. “But he's in a hurry, and impatience is dangerous.”

“Isn't it dangerous here?”

“It can be,” she said.

“Why do you do it?”

“Our project is totally different from what Marvin—”

“And I'm choosing it,” I said. Thomson smiled. I felt good, strong. Like I was standing up for myself.

“Yes,” he said. “Make effort for the positive. It always comes back to that. These days. For us.”

Thomson and I both looked at Phoenix. She was peering into her task, prodding the needle into bright red wool. “We get up early,” she said. “And we work hard.” I nodded. I wanted another drink but knew I shouldn't ask for it, since it was a gift I'd brought. Dusk had come and gone and the plastic over the sliding glass door was a blurry black. The candle started to gutter and after a little while, not long, what felt like only a few minutes, Phoenix stood and replaced it. She tugged a puffy orange sleeping bag from behind the couch and that was how I knew that I'd succeeded. I could stay there, at least spend the night. It was weird, why I didn't think of that, that if successful I'd be living down there. Surprising, like when you go on a trip and the arrival is still a bit of a shock. A little drunk, I felt in my pockets for the things I'd brought, but I hadn't brought anything.

I scanned the coffee table, examined the wide arm of the couch where Thomson had laid down his book, wondering if they had a phone. Margo needed to know where I was in case my mother called or Marvin went looking for me, but there were no screens glowing in the dim candlelight. I resolved to walk back home the next day, even though it would take a while, to collect a few clothes and other stuff and tell Margo what was happening.

The skin of the sleeping bag was cold against my neck when I wrapped it around my shoulders like a shawl.

“Where do I sleep?”

She tossed a thin air mattress onto the floor. “Here. This isn't Buckingham Palace.”

“Where do you . . .”

“Here. The couch is a bed. Thomson and I sleep there. When there's a blizzard and all you have is this stove, you have to keep each other warm.”

Thomson leaned forward and poured another finger of scotch. He lifted the bottle toward me and I pushed my glass under the spout. It didn't make sense to me then, that lack of boundaries. It was why I'd run to the city—to escape my parents' place, where my bed was in the centre of the apartment, on the couch.

Phoenix went back to mending her sock. Thomson picked up his book, and the two of them settled in like that, more or less as they were except with me in the chair across from them, as if I was watching a play. I didn't know what to do. It seems so simple to me now—get up, choose a book, find a shirt that needs new buttons, sit back down—but at that time I wasn't used to silence, slow time. It reminded me of when I'd first let my phone go. How I rode the overcrowded buses or walked down the street, suddenly seeing the world outside of the screen I'd been anchored in since I was fourteen. I saw others like me—that shocked look on their faces, holding the collars of their jackets closed as they covered the distance between now and then with only their brains to keep them occupied. I'd felt a piercing vulnerability, exactly the same as that night down in the dark zone, entirely at the mercy of what was happening around me, with no mediation to dull the discomfort. I walked over to the sliding glass door and pushed my face against the plastic. The hives glowed white.

“Read whatever you like,” Thomson said, and I went to the bookshelf, touched the tarnished gilt on a book's spine. It had been a long time since I'd read a book. I'd loved them as a child, reading with my mother or in the early years of school.

Phoenix was already annoyed by my wandering. The sock draped over her knee like a dog's tongue. “You'll have to find ways to entertain yourself,” she said, and I began to feel panicky, already wondering whether I'd made the right choice.

“Is there a bathroom?”

“I'll take you.”

“That's okay.”

But she'd already gotten out of her chair. I followed her into the hallway and past a flight of stairs. She stepped through a hole smashed in the wall. “Our escape route,” she said as I lifted my legs over the ledge of crumbling plaster and brick. I didn't ask from what. We were in the back of the neighbouring unit. At a heavy wooden door, she twisted open two brass locks and pointed into the night at an outhouse in the far corner of the tiny backyard.

“You can find your way back?”

I nodded. Stepping outside, my feet sank into mushy grass and mud. I had two soakers by the time I swung open the door of the stinky, small room and sat on the hole in the crude bench to empty my bladder. I remember that rush of hot urine, the pungent smell of waste far below. How foreign it all seemed. And how scared I suddenly was: scared at what I was doing. The loose reins in my hands, attached to wild forces.

“No problems?” Thomson said when I returned. I shook my head. I had decided to occupy myself as best I could until it was time to go to sleep and decide in the morning whether or not to stay. Grasshoppers were in the terrarium and I watched them leaping, knocking against the glass walls and tumbling back down. There was a mass of them, maybe a hundred. “Are these pets?” I asked.

“They're lunch,” Thomson said, his voice thick. I looked at the bottle. It was almost empty.

“They're good protein,” said Phoenix.

“Really?”

She shrugged. “It's something I'm trying. In most places in the world they eat bugs.” She set her sewing down carefully, the needle pinched in the fabric, and walked over to where I was. “Want one?”

It was like a dream, or maybe the extension of one that had started the night I'd been laid off. A series of dreams.

“No, thanks.”

But Phoenix didn't notice the tremor of disgust in my voice. She opened the lid of the terrarium, reached in, and pinched one between two fingers. “They aren't so bad.” The squirming insect emerged, futilely rubbing its wings. “We ate them in Mexico.” She popped it into her mouth. I heard the crunch of its body between her teeth.

Behind me, Thomson started laughing, a hooting bark that grew loud enough to make me smile. Phoenix pulled out another and held it between our faces. Its angular yellow body, its black specks of eyes, reminded me of lying in the long grass as a kid, watching the locusts fly across the sky. How my father hated them. How they decimated crops. But I realized I was hungry. Around four I'd had a small bag of stale potato chips and nothing since. Phoenix and I stared at each other. I closed my eyes, giving in. Her fingers nudged my lips and let go, and I bit down on the delicate exoskeleton, crushing the legs and wings. It tasted a bit like fish.

When I got
back from Shannon's, Thomson wasn't on the porch. The chaise lounge stood empty, the blanket a dull beige heap. In the house, I called his name, my voice loud in the empty rooms. I thought of Shannon's story about the fairies. Had she seen you? Were you also stealing from them? Perhaps you were part of a pack, a secret colony. I rushed outside. Marvin's shack was still locked. The outhouse door open, knocking quietly in the breeze. The air was full of the mineral smell of water hitting hot earth, the sharp scent of wet tomato vines. Thomson wasn't at the beach. Looking out at the water, speckled with rain, I remembered our walk the day before and raced back up the trail and around the house to the clearing where the bees lived, circled by tall pines that creaked in the wind. Thomson was bending over the open hive, staring through a mesh veil attached to his hat. Raindrops speckled the black fabric of the kimono-style robe he wore. A tarnished metal smoker for calming the bees hung from his hand, leaking grey coils of smoke.

“Thomson,” I called, scolding him as I ran into the crowd of insects. I took the smoker and squeezed the accordion-like handle like he'd first taught me, releasing acrid puffs. But it didn't stop them entirely. One stung my arm and I jumped back, brushing one hand over my body to clear away any others. Another stung me on the neck. Despite the calming effects of the smoke, how it made them stuff themselves with honey and less likely to sting, they still seemed angry. Impulsively, I dropped the smoker and ran to the edge of the clearing, into the skinny black tree trunks that Mr. Bobiwash once called the bone forest.

“You shouldn't be out here,” I shouted, swatting at the bees that had followed.

“Why are you so chicken?” Thomson called, leaning on his stick. Bending over, his fingers fished around on the ground. His naked arm extended through the wide sleeve of his robe. When he'd fastened onto the smoker, he straightened with effort. The bees clustered on him—his sinewy wrist, the rough red patch of his elbow. If they were stinging, he didn't seem to notice, and I wondered if I'd have to help him later, dab the spots with a cooling cream made from yellow calendula. Thomson blasted his body with smoke so he looked regal, a strange god emerging out of a cloud. When he turned to face me, a few feet away, the smoke still drifted around him and I could see how angry he was.

“You and Marvin haven't been taking care of things.”

I crossed my arms. “There's a lot to do.”

“I don't care about that.”

I stepped forward into the bramble that was the bees. On my fingers, I counted off our tasks: planting, weeding, harvesting, canning, setting the nets, hauling them in, gathering water, making fires, cutting wood, making salves, collecting herbs and mushrooms from out in the woods. “Even that fence,” I said, using Marvin's barricade against you as an excuse.

“I don't care,” Thomson repeated, his hand closing in a fist. He sounded like a child. “Look,” he shouted. A dense thicket of bees was crowding out of the dark opening at the bottom of the hive. They made one writhing body. A rumble of thunder sounded from up the coast, over the lake where the sky was darkest. I counted until the next one. The storm was far away, passing quickly. Thomson's free hand fumbled for mine and he pulled me, hard, toward the hive, puffing madly, making grey clouds. He handed me the smoker and used both hands to pull a brood frame out so I could see what he wanted me to: a row of cells, plugged with yellow wax, shaped like small peanuts. “Queens. Eight of them. Maybe more.”