We lay there on the bed, in the dark, smoking cigarettes.
They talked about this and that.
I stayed quiet.
We ate some more pills.
Shane stroked Shara’s hair. She gripped her chest and shook gently. I thought he spoke. I was sure he spoke.
“Let me tell you how to be happy.”
I was sure he said, “You’re already feeling the week’s death and rebirth on the horizon, and you wonder to yourself if this wasn’t going to become a problem, like get exponentially worse, like one day you’ll start mourning the death and rebirth of the day and then after that the death and rebirth of an hour and then maybe seconds and on and on. Seems like a totally not-chill way to live, right?”
I was sure he said, “Let me tell you how to be happy. Go outside and look up at the constellations and notice that there are two bees touching bright glowing stingers. Snap your fingers like ‘oh yeah!’ and go out to your garage where you keep your collection of bee stingers. Hopefully you’ve been collecting them steadily, as you are an adult, and have accumulated enough for the project at hand. Take a tube of superglue from the shelf and glue the stingers to each other, face up, until you form a little hollowed-out pyramid, about the size of a tent.”
While the others shouted in the living room, while they tacked up blankets to keep the sun from peeking through the blinds, he said there in the dark, “Throw the bee-pyramid into the back of your Jeep and drive out into the desert and set the pyramid on completely flat land, where the cracks in the dirt look like wrinkles in a brain. Take off all of your clothes and feel that cool night air. Do a dance, whatever dance you like, but while you do it look up at the bee constellation, right where you left it, and shout at it, tell it that you don’t want the week to die, that you’re worried that you can feel your skin getting older, that the weight of thousands of invisible signals is making your brain heavy and saggy, that you want an answer, dammit.”
While Shara breathed softly, while she arched her back and fought against the high, I was sure Shane said, “Retrieve the straight razor from the back of your trunk and cut out your tongue and let your mouth fill with blood, but do not break your concentration. You want answers, and now you’re speaking the bee’s language. Place your tongue in the middle of the bee-pyramid and continue to dance and inquire as to the nature of things until two bees appear before you, glowing radioactive green, their antennae touching. They will bend at the thorax and touch stingers and the stingers will meld together like two globs of paraffin wax in a lava lamp. At this point, the bees will begin to suck into each other, black eyes staring out in opposite directions, and if you wait until the two pairs of antennae connect and shrink like the last line of static stretched across a TV screen, disappearing to a point, if you wait until it gets to that point and you grab it, this floating green orb, and you put it in the dirt at your feet and spin a slow circle in the center of your bee stinger pyramid you will open a portal to the underworld. You’ll float down softly and you will never remember the constellations and you will slide down a hollowed-out femur like a straw cut length-wise into a pile of bones and you will meet the scorpion loa, the Baron Zaraguin, god of assassins, and you can ask him what’s coming, you can ask him but he won’t say a word, won’t read to you from the whiteboard hanging in the dark of his office.”
While Shara quieted on the bed, I was sure he said, “He’ll lower his stinger and you’ll wrap your arms around it and he’ll lift you up off the carpet of crushed bones to a green dot floating in the particle board of his ceiling, and you’ll forget what it means, this green dot, but it will remind you of the lasers that would shoot from the stage you stood on when you were in the dreams of a popstar from Tokyo, and you will reach out to the crowd and let them sing the lyrics to the songs you’ve written, but every audience member is only a lonely minstrel by a fire in the woods, and you’ll notice your hands, that they’re your mother’s hands, and that you are your mother, and you will meet your father as a young scared teenager and you will pass notes and you will walk home from the bus stop past the mailbox and then your head is through the green portal and you’re asleep in the desert in your bee stinger pyramid, with a brand-new tongue and a whole lot of happiness, under constellations you’ve only just remembered existed at all.”
They hollered and whooped out in the other room. They screamed and tore at their hair. But Shane just sat there in the dark with me. All the life was gone out of the space and the blinking clock on the nightstand, and I was sure the heathen said something.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
J David Osborne lives in Portland, OR with his partner and their dog. This is his third novel.