Serge looked at the woman. “Céline, aren’t we lucky to have Sean Penn as our first European bee sting in six years! Look in our refrigeration unit—I think we have some vials filled with the antidote to the Academy Award performance here.”
“Very funny.”
Serge gave me the let’s-play-ball stare. “Look, Julien, you’re twenty-two and your frontal lobe is incomplete. Argue all you will, but it’s a scientific fact. And part of having a frontal lobe still in development is the sense that you have a right to scorn everything around you, but all you really are is a biological cliché. Your brain has a few more years to go, so for the time being, you’re this judgment robot and everything you think and feel is the product of incomplete cortical hook ups and hormone-driven whims. So don’t try to pull any sort of superiority trip on me, because at the moment, what you consider to be your personality is, to me, an unwanted and boring obstacle in the way of finding out what we need to know.”
“Which is what?”
He paused slightly here, one of those pauses you look back on later and say to yourself, Ah, that’s when I should have been more alert. He said, “We’d like to learn what it is about you that attracts bees. That information might be of astonishing significance to the rest of the planet.”
“Oh.”
“So act like a fucking man.”
Céline said, “Just talk with us. Are you wearing cologne today?”
“Do I look like a club kid?”
“A simple ‘no’ will do. When did you last shower?”
“Four days ago.”
“Okay. Are you taking any prescriptions?”
“No.”
“What did you eat today?”
I had to think this over. “What do you mean by ‘today’?”
“Excuse me?”
“I think I’ve been up for twenty-six hours now. I don’t think the word ‘today’ applies to me.”
“What were you doing for twenty-six hours?”
“Playing World of Warcraft at this place on rue Claude Decaen.”
The woman was perplexed. Serge explained: “It’s a massive multi-player quasi-real-time online role-playing game set in a persistent-state parallel world that—”
“Got it.” The woman asked instead what I had eaten since I last slept.
“A strawberry yogurt. And half a Toblerone.”
“Alcohol? Sweet drinks?”
“No.”
The two of them looked at me, then the woman asked, “When was the last time you attended school?”
“Um. About three weeks ago.”
“Really?”
“My parents don’t know, and I’d prefer if you kept it quiet.”
They both looked at me. Serge said, “In a few hours you’re going to be rather well known. Your old life is over, Sean Penn. Like it or not, you’ve got a new life.”
Something beeped near the steering wheel. I looked out the windshield to see people in white smocks draping several townhouses with white nylon tarps. The Sean Penn jokes began to pile up.
Has Mr. Penn locked himself in his trailer?
Tell me, is Mr. Penn brooding and lost?
Sean, no smoking on government property!
Inside my degrading plastic box, I felt like a hamster. “My name is Julien,” I shouted.
Serge said, “Sean, Sean, Sean . . . watch your temper.”
The woman, Céline, said, “Please, Sean, don’t hurt us. We’re not paparazzi here to take photos of you.”
“Actually,” Serge said, “we are here to photograph you.” He held a military-grade Pentax capable of snapping three hundred 2-gig photos per second. “Let’s see the stinger.”
“Are you going to remove it?”
“In a moment.”
Céline held a focus chart while Serge did the zoom. Dozens of police and fire sirens blared away outside our crass, bloated, imperialistic Winnebago. From the racket, it sounded as if they were closing down the entire Bois de Vincennes. I mentioned this to my comedy duo. “The park?” said Serge. “They’ve shut down the entire arrondissement. All traffic north of the Seine and inside the Périphérique has been frozen. Every tree, every shrub, every bouquet of flowers and every building is being tarped and/or inspected. They’re determined to find the hive.”
“Will they?”
“I hope so.”
“What kind of scientist are you?”
He bristled for one billionth of a second before replying, “Typical young person—so self-involved he waits for a half-hour before he even asks. Tell me, Sean, have you been told you’re special your entire life? Is everything you do wonderful?”
I said, “This is fucked.”
“Ahh. Struck a nerve.”
“Serge, stop bugging him.” Céline caught my eye. “Serge is an expert on . . . proteins.”
“Oh?” I didn’t know much about proteins. “I saw a diagram of a hemoglobin molecule once, all folded and full of twists and surprises. If I ever design video games, it’d be a good map for a system of caves.”
Serge said, “Spoken like a man who still lives with his parents.”
There were two holes in the Plexiglas room, with gloves built into them, like something from a Chechen nuclear waste treatment facility. Serge reached in and, with Cirque du Soleil precision, opened a set of mini-doors, took my hand and tweezed out the stinger. He put it in a pillbox. “Now it’s time to take some blood.”
“Blood?”
“Yup, blood.”
Blood freaks me out. It’s one of the many reasons I reject the real world. “How much?”
“A bucket,” said Serge. “Just like Carrie.”
“Shush, Serge!” Céline looked at me. “A litre.”
“Hey! I’m pretty skinny. A litre to me is a big deal.”
“We have to take it now to establish benchmarks,” Céline said.
I looked away while they stuck their needle in, but I made the mistake of looking at the plastic bag when it was nearly full. The deep maroon colour was so . . . liquidy looking. I jerked and the needle popped out of my arm and blood sprayed all over my little room.
“Right,” said Serge, pissed. He twisted some sort of valve, and the next thing I remembered was waking up, far, far away.
DIANA
When I was stung on that cool Ontario afternoon, my response was the same as it would have been before bees became extinct: I shouted, “Fuckity fucking fuck, ow, holy shit that hurts, motherfucker!” I slapped my arm and the bee fell to the ground. Mitch, Erik and his wife were staring at me as if I were bleeding from my eyes. “You fucking fuckheads, stop staring!” Even Kayla the battered dog appeared taken aback by my language. “Don’t pretend to be so sanctimonious, you cheesy, hypocritical fucks.”
Erik looked at Mitch. “She has Tourette’s.”
Then I realized what had happened to me. I reached down and picked up the insect. “Oh, dear Lord, it’s a bee.” The other three inched towards me. Mitch dropped his two-by-four and said, “It’s mine. It’s my bee. We’re on my property.”
“No, it’s not. It was in the air,” Erik said. “In this country, you own mineral rights to the soil beneath your property, but you don’t own air rights.”
“The moment that thing landed on Sister Garbagemouth here,” Mitch said, “it ceased being airborne and it is hence part of my property.”
Erik said, “Only if you own Diana’s body, too. But slavery’s currently illegal. So it’s Diana’s bee.”
Erik’s wife looked at it closely. “I’d forgotten how small they are. To think I used to be frightened of them. And look, it’s been collecting pollen. See—its little pollen saddlebags are full.”
It dawned on me that I should leave before Mitch’s greed got the best of him, so I beelined (yes! A pun! I know, puns aren’t funny, but I love them! Possibly connected to my Tourette’s) to my place, where I shut the kitchen door behind me and locked it, leaving Mitch, Erik and his wife gaping. I swept away some cinnamon and suga
r left over from the morning’s toast, and placed the bee on top of a white sheet of paper on the kitchen table.
We all wanted the bees to come back, but in our hearts, none of us believed we deserved them—and then here I go and kill one. My temples were thumping furiously. I felt guilty that this living thing was now dead because it chose to sting me. I knew I had to phone the authorities.
I began to pray, then remembered that I’d not only been stung but had also just been excommunicated.
I let my hands drop and considered the act of praying. Does praying make my body emit waves like a cellphone? Am I always emitting waves, even when I’m doing dishes? Does deliberate praying merely increase the power of those waves? What is the physical mechanism whereby prayers are “heard”?
I wanted to pray but couldn’t bring myself to do so. Between animal violence, excommunication and being stung by the first bee in Canada for God knows how many years—and losing faith in the process of prayer—I’d had quite the half-hour. And it wasn’t over yet. While I was staring at the bee atop its white paper, Mitch started to pound on the door. “Give me back my bee, you stupid bitch!” The door was jiggling, and I doubted its ability to withstand a full-on Mitch attack, so I gathered up my bee and retreated to the basement storm cellar, locking it from the inside. This wasn’t cowardice; this was me being practical—and not wanting my specimen damaged. (In a few weeks I’d watch archived news footage of the RCMP doing a takedown of Mitch on my front lawn, smashing his face into the dandelions and sorrel, pulling his arms back with delicious amounts of force and cuffing his hands behind him. Ahh . . . excess force. Sometimes I rather like it.)
Maybe five minutes later there was a knock on the cellar door. Much to my relief, it was the RCMP, clad in haz-mat suits. Overkill? Through the plastic they demanded, “Give us the bee. Give us the bee.” I did. It went into a small box, like one for a wedding ring. I got to the top of my basement stairs to find my house being tarped with white polypropylene sheets. Outside the front door, the whole neighbourhood was being shrouded. For the first time in my life, the future felt futuristic.
I think I’m coming across as Miss Cool Customer here, discussing the Mitch/Kayla debacle, my bee sting and all those goons wearing haz-mat suits as if I were doing a homework assignment on the 1962 Congo Crisis. I’m such a total fucking hypocrite.
I haven’t mentioned how, during this whole bee sting episode, a quarter of my brain was preoccupied with finding a way to stick a Henckels four-star carving knife into Erik’s wife’s pearl-clad throat to clear the way for my infatuation with him—but another quarter wanted to drag Erik down to Lake Nipissing and drown him for being a smug prick and for taking Mitch’s side against the dog, as well as for excommunicating me from my little Baptist escape inside a converted pet food store on McIntyre Street—a place that still smells, after all these years, of kibble, especially at the back, where we keep the piano. Erik and I bought the piano for a song on craigslist from a family warring over who got the dead mother’s Audubon placemats. They were too preoccupied to bargain. As long as we had two hundred bucks and a truck to haul the thing away before sunset, it was ours. We celebrated this deal with gin and tonics at a grill on the edge of town, where people wouldn’t recognize us. Neither of us are drinkers. In that first boozy flush, I asked coded questions about Eva (notice how I hate using her name) to determine if they were happy or not. “Do you guys talk much during dinner?”
“No, not since she got her promotion as day hostess at that new Beatles theme restaurant. Too much on her mind, I guess.”
I believed that what was on Eva’s mind was actually Miguel, the Beatles restaurant prep chef, a known rake recently separated from his umpteenth, a shitty little Latin sleaze. I saw him and Eva sharing nachos and refried beans at Mexicali Rosa’s one night, and they weren’t discussing shepherd’s pie or thirty-percent-off coupons for seniors.
Then I asked, “Any kids on the way?”
“You’d think there would be, but we’re having problems in that area—sorry, I shouldn’t really be talking about this.”
“I’m Switzerland. Consider me a neutral middle party. All I care about is you and Eva and the flock. I gave up on things of the flesh after Andy.”
Andy is my ex, a probably gay guy with major father issues and a set list of twenty sugary guitar songs he plays at social gatherings upon the slightest provocation. He smells of Rogaine and failure. Andy and I were never much of anything, but maybe it makes people more comfortable to think I’d at least had someone in my life.
I found myself telling all of this to Sandra from the Emerging Blood-Borne Agents Division of Winnipeg’s Level-4 lab, one of only fifteen Level-4 labs in the world: thirty coats of paint on every surface, with an epoxy floor three inches thick. Marburg? Tallahassee-B flu? Screw that—they cleared out the entire place for me. I was H5N, SARS-Guangxu and holy retribution all snarled up into one friendly little bee sting that left the facility in shock. And Sandra was my admitting nurse. Or scientist. Or . . . who knows what anyone does in these places.
I said, “Listen to me talk and talk. I feel like I’ve just unloaded twenty clowns from a Volkswagen bug.”
Sandra said, “Not to worry. How are you feeling right now?”
I’d been flown the twelve hundred miles to Winnipeg inside a plastic bubble like a child’s swimming pool. “I feel fine. It was good to vent about Erik and all that. Thank you for listening.”
I must add that Sandra was on speakerphone on the other side of a two-inch-thick Lucite window.
“Anything else unusual happen lately?” she asked. “Anything that stands out? A new perfume? An old box you found in the attic?”
I had a vision of my house being taken apart like it was made of Lego. It was the one thing I owned that I actually cared about, an inheritance from my paternal aunt. It was an early 1960s rancher, and boring as dirt, but I loved it.
“Your house is fine. You’ll never know we were there.”
I was creeped out—was she reading my mind? But Sandra just looked down at her papers. I asked her, “Sandra, what do you know that I don’t?”
“How do you mean?”
“When I got here, I looked at the guy pulling the syringe’s plunger when I gave my first blood specimen. He was treating my blood like it was Elvis come back to life and performing at Aloha Stadium. His fingers were practically vibrating. Something big’s going on.”
“I really can’t say.”
“I’m just wondering . . . when a blackfly bites you, it goes deep. When a bee stings you, it’s maybe the top layer of skin and a few nerves—it’s pretty superficial. How much damage can one bee sting do?”
Sandra said, “Zack’s body nearly exploded from one little sting.”
Of course I knew about Zack. Everyone on earth did. “Yeah, but Zack was allergic,” I said. “Look, my father was a vet, so I grew up hyper-aware of mad cow and bird flu and all that. I’m aware of invisible cooties that jump species.”
“I really can’t say anything more.”
“Gotcha, you lying cunthead with badly dyed roots.” Pardon my Tourette’s.
Of the five Wonka children, I was the only one who knew from the start that we weren’t just random stings. Though Harj figured it out pretty quickly, too, and then his insights dwarfed my own.
HARJ
A bee! A bee! You can’t imagine what a thrill it gave me to see one. I remember as a child seeing them swarm the jacaranda trees in the harbour or flitter amid the plumerias beside the post office under the high noon sun. An early teacher, Mrs. Ames from Connecticut, a bored UNESCO housewife, had taught us in detail about bees, training us to think of them as friends, not enemies—a smart decision, I think. One could say the same thing about worms. Unless we are taught from an early age to like and love them, they are rather disgusting things to cope with when encountered. For that matter, a plate of Bolognese spaghetti might be a terrifying thing to encounter for the first time. I could make a list of
other such examples, but I will not.
Nobody in the call centre witnessed my bee stinging me. I looked at it, and it was like seeing a long-lost friend—the happiness it brought me!
I quite forgot young Leslie from the New York Times on the other end of the line. She probably interpreted my silence as artistic temperament, but she finally asked, “Werner? Werner, are you there?”
I told her that my name wasn’t actually Werner, it was Harj, and that I was sorry I had led her on, and that I was actually working in an Abercrombie & Fitch call centre in Trincomalee, the capital of Sri Lanka.
“Don’t dick with me. I’m on deadline.”
“I just told you the truth. If you like, give me some words and I will write them on a piece of paper and then photograph them for you, and in the background you can see my hateful boss, Hemesh, as well as the guava bins at the far end of the warehouse.”
For whatever reason, she gave me the words EASY-BAKE OVEN. I wrote this and then held them up to the camera. The resulting photograph had Hemesh’s morbidly obese posterior neatly positioned to the right. I also sent her a photo of myself making a peace sign, and then said to her, “Do you want to know something far more interesting than this?”
“This would be hard to top, Harj.”
I photographed my bee on the desktop and sent the image to her. “This thing just stung me. You heard me say ouch.”
“Nice try.”
“I am not speaking in jest. Let me zoom in on it.” This was a chance to exploit my cellphone’s micro-zoom lens, which could turn an area the size of my pinkie fingernail into a 200-meg file. I photographed the bee atop the piece of paper that said EASY-BAKE OVEN and sent the file.
Leslie paused, then said, “You’re kidding.”
“No, I am not.”
“Huh.”
Hemesh looked in my direction and, hateful boss that he is, was able to intuit that I was not doing productive work for the Abercrombie & Fitch Corporation. He yelled something at me, and I told young Leslie that I had to go. I said, “Thank you for expressing interest in our winter collection, and please shop again in the future with Abercrombie & Fitch.”