She gave me a piece of bread. The honey, not translucent, but rather a cloudy color, coiled over the slice, oozed out and down into the bread.
“Taste it!”
She took a large bite herself.
The smell of honey, of her and of a half-eaten Swammer pie on the counter turned my stomach. Nonetheless, compelled by my upbringing, out of foolish courtesy, I took a bite.
I nodded as it swelled in my mouth.
“Very good.”
I chewed while I tried not to think about the brood and larvae that were in the honey, crudely pressed out of the straw hive.
She kept her eyes on me at all times while she ate. Finally she licked the honey off her fingers, excessively, with a self-assurance verging on the ridiculous. “Lovely. Now it’s time to do a bit of work.”
At long last she walked out, although walked… Her hips undulated out the door, I was unable to refrain from looking at them and ended up just standing there, in the middle of the floor.
Then she was finally gone. I took two steps around myself, breathing rapidly. A drop of honey remained on the counter. I wiped it away quickly, trying to erase it from my mind, along with her, the moist lips, the pimples, the almost obscene movement her midsection performed with every tiny gesture she made. Hips I could pound up against, as if she were earth. But I restrained myself. I took control. Even if it would require all the strength I had.
The only chair in the shop beckoned me. I stumbled over to it, placed my expanded backside on the seat. I crossed my hands over my abdomen as if to hold myself in place.
I just sat there and breathed deeply. Several minutes passed, the fever in me cooled down, the nausea subsided. Yes, I was able to control myself.
It was hot, a strip of sunlight revealed dust particles in the air right in front of me. They moved calmly, suspended weightlessly in the air. I pursed my lips and blew at them. They leapt away, but stabilized again with surprising quickness.
I blew again, harder this time. They flew away this time, too, before quickly reverting to their former shapeless existence, so light that nothing could fetter them. I tried focusing on them one by one. But my eyes stung. There were too many.
So I shifted my attention to the entirety. But there was no whole, just infinite amounts of uncontrollable dust particles.
It was no use. Not even that. They defeated me. Not even this was something I could control.
And so I sat, completely overpowered. An impotent child once again.
I was ten years old. Streaks of sunlight shone through the foliage in the forest, spreading a golden tint over it all, everything was yellow. I sat on the ground. The soil that throbbed up from beneath me was warm and damp through my trousers. Motionless, with intense concentration I sat there, in front of the anthilclass="underline" at first glance, a blessed chaos. Every single creature so tiny and insignificant, it was inconceivable how they could have built a hill that almost towered over me. But with time I understood more and more. Because I never grew weary, I could sit for hours and watch them. They moved in clear patterns. Carried, put down and retrieved. It was meticulous and peaceful work, systematic, instinctive, hereditary. And work that was not about each individual, but about the community. Individually they were nothing, but together they were the anthill, as if it were a single, living creature.
Something was awakened in me when I understood this, a warmth unlike any other, a fervor. Every day I tried to get my father to come with me, in here, in the yellow wood. I wanted so much to show him what they had accomplished, what such small creatures could manage together. But he just laughed. An anthill? Leave it in peace. Do something useful, lend a hand, let’s see what you’re made of.
That’s how it had been on this day, too. He had mocked me, and again I was here alone.
All of a sudden I discovered something, a breach in the system. A beetle had crept up on the outside of the hill, where the sun was shining. It was of monstrous proportions compared to the ants. The sunlight reached down between the trees and a ray hit the beetle’s back. It stood completely still now. A space opened up around it, none of the ants walked past, they left it alone, they continued with their purposeful work. Nothing more happened.
But then I became aware of an ant on its way towards the beetle; it broke away from the customary patterns, was no longer a part of the whole.
And it was carrying something.
I squinted. What was it? What was it carrying?
Larvae. Ant larvae. Now more of them were coming, more of them broke the pattern and they all brought the same thing. They were all carrying their own children.
I leaned closer to look. The ants dropped the larvae in front of the beetle. It stood still for a moment, rubbing its front legs against each other. Then it started to eat.
The beetle’s jaws worked furiously. I leaned over as closely as I could. The larvae disappeared into its mouth, one after the next. The ants stood in a long row, ready to serve the beetle their own offspring. I wished I could look away, but was unable to keep myself from watching.
Another larva, down into its mouth. And the ants waited, they had interrupted their usual patterns, liberated themselves from the whole to carry out this atrocity.
They crawled on me, within me. My cheeks became red hot, the blush spread through my whole body, the blood reached every part of me. I didn’t want to see, became unwell, but was unable to stop myself. To my astonishment I felt a pumping sensation beneath the fly of my trousers. A sensation I had only barely discerned previously, but which was suddenly all-consuming. I squeezed my thighs together, squeezed around what had grown hard. Another larva was crushed between the jaws of the beetle. The wide-set eyes glistened, the antennae moved. I lay down on my stomach, flat on the ground, striking against the earth, thought my trousers would be soiled and ruined, but was unable to stop. At the same time, there were waves of nausea inside me, because the larvae were killed. They disappeared into the beetle’s bowels. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. And it aroused me.
While I was lying there and pounding hard against the earth, I heard footsteps behind me, my father’s steps. He’d come after all, he stopped and he observed, but didn’t see anything of what I wanted to show him. He just saw me, the child I was and my infinitely great shame.
This moment, me on the ground. My father’s initial astonishment, subsequently his laughter, short and cold, was without joy and full of loathing, of scorn.
Look at you. You are pathetic. Shameful. Primitive.
It was worse than everything else, even worse than the belt I had a taste of when evening came and the glaring pain across my back all through the night. I just wanted to show him, explain to him and share my enthusiasm, but all he could see was my shame.
Chapter 43
GEORGE
I drove down to the center of Autumn. Well, center is a bit of an overstatement. Autumn was actually just a single intersection. A northbound highway met another heading east, and there were a few houses gathered there. I didn’t have a lot of gas left, but didn’t fill up. Never more than half a tank. It was a new gimmick I’d come up with. And I drove until the tank was empty. As if it cost less to fill up an empty tank halfway than a half-full tank all the way.
The disappearances had been given a name now. Colony Collapse Disorder. It was on everyone’s lips. I tried it out. The words rotated through my head. There was a rhythm to them, and the same letters. The Cs and the Os and the Ls and the Ss. A little rhyme, Colony Collapse Disorder. Dilony Collapse Collorder, Cillono Dollips Cylarder, and something medical about the whole thing, as if it belonged in a room with white coats and intensive care equipment, not out in my field with the bees. Still, I never used those words. They weren’t mine. Instead, I said the disappearances, or the problems, or—if I was in a bad mood, and quite often I was—the damn trouble.