I nodded.
He looked at me.
We sat there.
All right, so why did they do this?
I shrugged.
He grabbed the back of my neck, pulled me forward a little, and punched me.
So I told him. Everything.
He agreed with me, 100-fucking-percent as he put it, that my actions or nonactions or whatever the hell I wanted to call them had been stupid.
Nice work, Mr. Jackass, is exactly what he said.
I asked him if I could get him anything. Maybe a snack or something.
He said, yeah.
I said, what?
He said, shut up for fuck’s sake, stupid, what did you do with it?
I told him.
He looked at me.
So why haven’t they gotten it yet?
Because I think I may have put the wrong address on it.
Jesus, he said.
Speaking of stupid, or of stupidly, I am put in mind of the following anecdote once told to me, or actually twice. A former colleague was set the task, well within her expertise, of executing the following procedure: (1) removing someone’s kidney; (2) laying said someone on his / her back in a bathtub full of ice cubes; (3) placing a note on his / her chest, which would read along the lines of, if you would like to live please dial Emergency. Part 1 was approached carefully. Part 2 was accomplished neatly. Part 3 was unfortunately, however, forgotten, too bad, effectively botching the exercise, which had been meant only to serve as a warning. Later I tried recounting the anecdote, but could not remember which part of the procedure the former colleague had left out, and so subsequently solicited and received a retelling of the anecdote by a colleague who was neither the one who figured as the hero of the anecdote, nor the one who had first told it to me, but rather was a third colleague, who for practical reasons was also intimately acquainted with the details of the affair.
I am not entirely certain, in this instance, that I have used the word, hero, correctly.
Ah, well.
It suddenly occurred to us that what was stupid was for us to be sitting there.
On the way out the door, John said, not without justification, and I suppose it would have ruined your little instance of intractability to just bring it back to them, and I said, yeah, I guess.
We decided to split up. First, though, we tried to call her apartment. No answer. Several possible reasons presented themselves, a couple of which neither of us wished to contemplate, and we decided that we would each, individually, continue to try calling, because going over there right now was out of the question. We split up. Each of us, as it occurred, with someone following. A little while later I got clubbed on the head.
But first, for a while, I went through the city with someone following me. I have already mentioned that it was cold. Then it started to rain. It was the sort of rain, as it has been throughout, that is far from being pleasant. And perhaps because of thinking about the unpleasant rain falling on and around me, and, by extension I suppose, about the sometimes mysterious and unpleasant rain that I had used to hear falling behind the stretch of wall in my apartment, not to mention, at times, behind a much larger stretch of wall in my dreams, I thought of the downstairs neighbor and of the hole puncher and of John’s account of his dealings with the downstairs neighbor, I mean of how he had dealt with the downstairs neighbor, and of tenant relations, that too, absurdly.
I walked along the river in the rain for a while, then stopped walking along the river. This for two reasons. Three. One was the fact that John had, so recently, told the story, or rather, the expurgated story, of our experience with the corpse in the flowered skirt, which is, with several facts added to it, entirely different. I don’t know why, in fact, he felt obliged to bring it up. All of it was a mistake, right from the start, both in its inception, and in its absurd conclusion — the part which I described John relating while we all sat telling each other stories under a tree.
It wasn’t her, he had said after I had heard the shot and he had climbed back to the car where I was waiting for him.
What do you mean? I had said.
I mean it wasn’t her. I didn’t get a good look until after it was done.
That was one reason. Another was the earlier and above-mentioned bit of business I had done for the organization I was now in trouble with.
That bit of business had involved this river, a big bag, and some rocks.
The third, strangely, was the beekeeper, and his monologue about nature and God-knows-what.
Nature, had said the beekeeper, is really quite intelligent. Both as to its inceptions — he was the first to have used these words — and its conclusions. Do you wish, he had asked us, to speak of punctuation? Do you wish to speak of commas and semicolons? Ellipses and apostrophes? Nature possesses it all. Take for example your average bee. Happening to have a dead one or two in his pocket, he had done so. He went pretty fast. He went from bees to planets and from grammar to physics in about three-and-a-half sentences. It was, the dead bee he had passed around, a planet in a solar system and the solar system in the galaxy and the galaxy in the universe. He explained the connections. Which allowed for curved space and chaos theory and dark matter and a few other things. It did all seem quite intelligent. The way he described it. Extremely.
So what you are saying is that everything is dead like the average bee? I asked him.
But at that moment he was called away.
Walking along the river I found myself wondering if, in all its morpho / syntactical brilliance, nature would be smart enough to make me, say, take a bullet in the back of the head.
After the beekeeper had concluded his discourse, which he had only ended because his wife, somewhere off in the distance, had begun calling him with a bullhorn, we talked about honey for a while. We had all, we confessed to each other, been pleasantly lulled by the old man’s voice and dead bees and chewed-up nose — it was only later that I became agitated. We lay there on our backs talking about honey, about its different colors and grades — yum, we said — and wondered aloud if dead bees produced ghosts as dead fleas, it had been said, did, and if ghosts of bees would go on making honey and what that honey would taste like, probably not so good, though we couldn’t be sure, but sooner or later we’d find out, and we concluded that nature, especially given the creation of honey, all kinds of honey, really was, as the beekeeper had said, quite smart.
Honey was smart.
Honey was brilliant.
Even if I, another aspect of nature’s expression, wasn’t.
That night, incidentally, out there in the country with her, I dreamed hooks again.
And again, in the face of my utter distress, she was admirably, heartbreakingly calm.
I called her apartment. She answered. I got clubbed over the head.
That was certainly a clear-enough conclusion.
Think of its complexity, the beekeeper had said. I would require an entire sheet of paper to list all the treasures it contains. It is so very, very complex, he had ended, shaking his head.
Very, very complex indeed. When I woke up the first thing I saw was a shelf with a jar of honey sitting on it.
John, incidentally, was not clubbed over the head, as he had managed, he later told me, to slip the tall, thin woman who was following him. This maneuver had involved entering the restaurant where we had once had our turkey dinner, and leaving that restaurant by way of a window. Having slipped the woman, he had called their apartment and got her. We’re fine, she said. Where’s Deau? Shopping for dinner. And in a manner of speaking, that was true. Dinner was cooking, my dinner. I smelled onions and stewed apples at almost the same time I saw the shelf.
I don’t know when the two of them left. Perhaps, of course, they did not leave, and throughout the process were sitting among the shelves in the back room, some of which, no doubt, were still empty, having not, as yet, found objects for themselves.