Wiggs stepped out onto the asphalt and lifted a benign, expectant face skyward, like the good-guy earthling in a flying-saucer movie. The bees ignored his gesture. They buzzed the area two or three more times, then flew directly for Huxley Anne.
Many in the group screamed, but a horrified hush fell over them when the bees landed on the little girl's head.
“Don't move!” someone said, in a stage whisper. “Don't move!” Huxley Anne wasn't moving. The bees weren't moving much, either.
Once they had established their position, evenly distributed, rather like a skullcap atop the child's head, the bees stilled their wings, dropped their antennae, bent their knees, rested the thousand facets of their compound eyes, withdrew their tubed tongues and barbed stingers, and sort of settled in.
Huxley Anne looked at Wiggs. He smiled encouragingly.
The paralysis of the onlookers was finally broken when a driver started up his van. “I'll get the cops,” he yelled out the window.
“You do and I'll rip your esophagus out,” said Wiggs. He moved toward the van. “Turn that engine off.”
The startled driver did as he was told. Nobody else in the crowd moved a muscle.
Slowly, Wiggs walked over to Huxley Anne. “You're okay, aren't you, darling?” he asked. When she nodded, the onlookers gasped. But the bees didn't stir. At close range, Wiggs could detect a slight pulsation of each bee's abdomen, as if it were absorbing something through osmosis.
“Where can you rent a car around here?” Wiggs asked.
A redcap pointed nervously.
Wiggs took Huxley Anne's hand, and as the others looked after them with bulging eyes, they walked off toward the airport perimeter.
While Dr. Dannyboy filled out the required forms, Huxley Anne stayed out of sight at the rear of the car agency, admiring some hibiscus that grew there.
By the time Priscilla's taxi arrived at the airport, father and daughter — and bees — were pulling out of the lot, burning rubber, and scattering the crushed oyster shell that New Orleans used for gravel.
“This is the big one!” Wiggs sang from the wheel. “This one is bigger than Carlos Castaneda and Levi-Strauss put together! Bigger than the bomb! Bigger than rock 'n' roll!” Then he added, “Of course, the next time she goes to the hairdresser, there may be a bit of a problem.”
Priscilla didn't hear him. In fact, she never heard from him again, although rumors were later to reach her that he had moved to an orchid farm in Costa Rica, or else a jasmine plantation in Jamaica.
Priscilla took to her bed and remained there all weekend. She felt like a can of cheap dog food that had been ruptured by a railroad spike. Something mealy and ugly might have oozed out of her, except for the fact that the twenty-five — thousand-dollar deposit receipt made a highly effective Band-Aid.
Material things anchor one in life much more firmly than purists would like to believe.
We seem to face an enemy who, no matter how many times we win, will best us in the end. He has so many allies: time, disease, boredom, stupidity, religious quackery, and bad habits. Maybe, as Dr. Dannyboy has postulated, all these things, including disease and our relationship with time, are merely bad habits. If so, an ultimate victory is possible. For individuals, if not for the mass. And maybe evolution — playful, adventurous, unpredictable, infuriatingly slow (by our standards of time) evolution — will rescue us eventually, according to a master plan.
Meanwhile, we are beleaguered. We hold the pass. The fragile hold the pass precariously, hiding behind boulders of ego and dogma. The heroic hold the pass a bit more tenaciously, gracefully acknowledging their follies and absurdities, but insisting, nevertheless, on heroism. Instead of shrinking, the hero moves ever toward life. Life is largely material, and there is no small heroism in the full and open enjoyment of material things. The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.
To physically overcome death — is that not the goal? — we must think unthinkable thoughts and ask unanswerable questions. Yet we must not lose ourselves in abstract vapors of philosophy. Death has his concrete allies, we must enlist ours. Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.
The solution to the ultimate problem may prove to be elemental and quite practical. Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.
By Sunday evening, Priscilla was feeling slightly better, feeling less like a dented can of cheap dog food than like a dented can of expensive dog food. Alpo instead of Skippy.
For the diversion that was in it, she switched on the television. On the Sunday Night Movie, a small boy named Jesse Jonah was pedaling his bike into the voracious vacuum of a black hole with a message from the Security Council of the United Nations. “I've been here before,” said Priscilla. She changed channels and found a magazine-format documentary program.
After exposing corruption and chicanery in two governing bodies and three major industries, the program focused on a new dance craze that was sweeping Argentina.
“They call it the bandaloop,” said the announcer, “and everyone is doing it.”
Priscilla sat up in bed.
On the screen, the dancers were skipping and bounding about the floor in a kind of exaggerated polka. Every once in a while, they would stop, execute a little backward and forward jitterbug step, then, yelling “Bandaloop!” they would jump straight in the air, up and down, five times.
Priscilla sat more erect. “Morgenstern,” she whispered.
“But the bandaloop is more than just another dance fad,” the announcer said. “It's a health fad, as well. Supposedly, it can add years, even decades, to your life.”
A familiar face appeared on the screen.
“The man who is singularly responsible for the bandaloop epidemic is a veteran Argentine accordion virtuoso named Effecto Partido.”
Priscilla leaned forward.
“A respected amateur ethnomusicologist, Señor Partido last year accompanied a small group of scientists, including the late Nobel prize-winning chemist, Wolfgang Morgenstern, into the most remote area of the Patagonian wilderness. Partido's interests were musical, but the scientists were there to investigate the habits of a little-known tribal people whose average life span was said to exceed one hundred and forty years. The scientists have yet to comment, but according to Partido, the secret of the tribe's longevity was the dance they performed several times each day: the bandaloop.”
The camera panned to dancers in a Buenos Aires night spot, then back to a close-up of Effecto, who, Priscilla perceived, was looking youthful and fit, indeed.
“Theese dance she make zee blood happy, zee bones happy. I don't know how explain eet, but theese dance she celebrate that we are not, you know, died already.”
As the announcer chuckled, the camera panned to a warehouse, painted bright pink. “The bandaloop requires so much space that the traditional tango clubs of Argentina can only accommodate three or four dancers at a time. So Effecto Partido acquired an empty warehouse near the Buenos Aires waterfront and converted it into a bandaloop club. The place is jammed every night of the week — and Effecto Partido, who also leads the band and takes frequent accordion solos, is South America's newest millionaire. His nightclub, by the way, is called Priscilla.”