The Beekeeper

There was a run on toilet paper and hand sanitizer, the likes of which the world has never known. That was the latest. It was all over the TV news. In the papers and on social media. That is all Tom Candle knew about, or would admit to knowing, anyway. The rest he shut out. There was also a run on fear, and in their fear people were doing wild things. The TV and internet news was full of it, spreading the panic worse than the panic spread itself. People suddenly avowing their love of Jesus Christ, just in case. People having affairs. People committing terrible, unthinkable crimes. People quitting their jobs and stockpiling weapons to shoot people who trespass, or so they can get what they need when they need it if the need arises. Or they were just shriveling up to die the way worms do after it rains and they get washed out onto the sidewalk, when the merciless sun comes out to bake them.

Tom was no such worm. Nor was he full of panic that oozed from him with any kind of a desperate enough situation. He fell into none of those categories, in fact, not in the least. Tom was the calm, unaffected sort. He lived in a cabin in the woods in rural Ohio because of his extreme social anxiety, which he would never admit. He went to the store rarely and ordered most everything online. His soul seemed to lack fear of anything except large crowds and hordes of people. Or maybe it was that he disliked the propensity people have to do utterly wild and stupid things when panic ensues. 

But he was currently doing a wild thing himself. He was driving east through Pennsylvania into the heart of it. What the radio news he just switched off called, “The American Epicenter.” On TV, New York was blotted out with a big red dot, like someone had a nose bleed and there it fell with a fateful plop. He relaxed and listened to the music she would tease him about. Old big-band music. Kitty Kallen. Vera Lynn. Al Bowlly. He could see her in the passenger seat now, laughing at him, closing her eyes and pretending to snore with her head limp against the passenger window. He smiled back at the ghost of her, telling her she didn’t know what she was missing. But then she was gone as quick as she came and the highway was once again a dark and peaceful place.

No one quite knows why about the toilet paper. There was little to no diarrhea affect, though one can assume it was just in case the quarantine lasted a month or two, or longer. It is one of those things that no one wanted to live without. You could go on without ketchup or mayonnaise or batteries, but no one wanted to think about going without toilet paper. Of course, if need be, one could go without toilet paper fine, substitute something else, but it was an unsavory thought to most people who have been pampered all their lives with practical but inessential items such as toilet paper, so much so that they hardly even thought of them. Took them for granted. Except, for now, of course. Toilet paper was like a pig in mud and having it’s day. After decades and decades of neglect and being an afterthought, it was on everyone’s mind like a prom queen. No longer used in such obscene abundance. No longer thrown in people’s trees and on their cars and houses as teenage pranks. The shelves were bare of this bare necessity and the same unscrupulous people who had been stockpiling the Charmin had been buying up wipes, too, with no regard for babies. Most grocery stores were cleaned out and looked like the first inning of an apocalypse. Of course, it certainly was not the apocalypse, but people are dramatic creatures. People were dying by the hundred thousands and it could very well reach the millions soon, but the human species had plenty to spare and would go on and do something stupid again in a decade or so and the same panic would inevitably reoccur using this one as a reference point.

However, in regards to the hoarding and the barren supermarket shelves, there were anomalies. Sparsity knew not everywhere so well as it did the affluence of suburbia. Just outside of Altoona, Pennsylvania, Tom pulled off to get gas which was at a record low 1.57 a gallon. Gas hadn’t been so cheap in a decade or more, so some profited nicely, despite their concurrent miseries. He paid at the pump, but the brightly lit gas station looked so inviting and beckoned him, being one of those space-station-types which kindled a childlike curiosity. And feeling as though a walk about the place would do his tired bones some good, he went inside. It was in the back of his mind to buy a gift for a little girl who he had never met, and an older girl who he could not forget.

The place was nearly empty except for the haggard-looking night clerk who looked like she had survived an apocalypse or two, and a few wars in her time. There were no other people inside. Maybe it was because of the ungodly hour. Maybe it was the remote location, or the fear of doomsday germs, or maybe P.A. had declared a ban on all non-essential travel as they had in other states, he heard reported on NPR. He liked to think it was anything other than the thinning of the species, and though that would be good for his social anxiety, he wasn’t so greedy or unethical to hope for it. 

Regardless, there were shelves and shelves of glorious toilet paper and he stood there and looked at it all, his eyes as big as baseballs. Charmin. Angel Soft. Cottonelle. Take your pick. Any brand you could name was right there and it wasn’t at all marked up, other than it was at gas station prices which was above what you would pay in most supermarkets. He felt the tinge to buy all he could fit in his Jeep, but realized it was idiotic. It was all idiotic. Back home in Ohio, and probably here in rural P.A., they were stockpiling guns and ammo. In case things got desperate like they were desperate in New York City, the destination typed into his GPS.

He bought only two packs of toilet paper, Angel Soft, and then went to the grocery aisle and bought another few boxes of pancake batter. Already in his car he had enough to make pancakes for a family of three for two years, conservatively. He also had boxes and boxes of syrup of all kinds. He had an army of Aunt Jemimas and some of the real stuff in thick glass bottles that cost much more. He had plenty of butter and a whole box of chocolate chips and blueberries, so he felt reasonably covered for his mission. It was nice, though, just to look at full shelves of toilet paper again. He felt a sense of inexplicable reassurance. He smiled with his hands in his pockets. He leisurely strolled about and bought a coffee and a teddy bear with a big red bow around its neck. He left and strapped the teddy bear into the passenger seat of his Jeep and pulled back onto the highway, the voice of his GPS demanding that he make a U-turn.

Fifty miles later he hadn’t got a word out of the bear. Not a name. Nothing. It just stared ahead and said nothing at all. Then around New Jersey, the bear opened up a little. He could tell it was nervous. I am nervous, too, he admitted, hoping it would serve as an icebreaker. But they were not nervous for the same reason. What will she think of me after all these years? Tom asked. It’s been four, he told the bear. I missed Beatrice’s birth. I missed three birthdays. I missed three anniversaries. The death of her father. I sent flowers. What? Yes, I called. A handful of times. Did she want to talk to me? For a while, I guess. Did she call me? No. But I gave up my cell phone, and she isn’t the call or text type. Did I move on? No. Not really. I know what it means. The body did, I suppose. But the heart? No. Never.  Did she? I don’t know, bear, I guess that is the great mystery. Probably so, but who knows. I don’t care if she did. I know she is single now. I saw it on Facebook. This pandemic is like a singles club. What’s Facebook? It’s a social media ... oh, forget it. She probably thinks I’m a bastard, anyway. I still have a key, though. I never mailed her back the key. Who broke up with who? I left, bear. I just up and left out of the blue. New York City wasn’t for me, that’s for sure, and I wasn’t selling anything to anyone. I was washed up.

It was shortly after dawn when he got to the city. The only thing that changed was the million cars that were off the street, which helped him relax. There were a few taxis running still. Essential travel. You had to have a permit of some type, documents, but what would they do to you? They wouldn’t take you to jail, they would just chastise you like New Yorkers do and tell you to go home. Taxis will always run, regardless of anything, sure as rats and cockroaches will. But there were no tourists, for certain, unless they were stranded when the quarantine was ordered. They’d be in hotels which were losing money hand-over-fist. The homeless were given rooms in the Waldorf Astoria. Overflow from the shelters and schools. Everyone was losing something. No one was gaining anything but time with loved ones, funny to say that prefaced with a but. Time to write the great American novel. To get to know your kids. The truly important things. So on and so forth.

The greatest debt was the lives of nearly a million people thus far. For some reason, the lives of children were largely spared, which some people considered to be a miracle. Some expressed a sort of affinity for the honor of the virus, the way they had an affinity for Tony Montana in Scarface when he refused to kill the kids with the car bomb. So the virus became seen by some as an angry Cuban in a polyester suit with virulent machismo. It was a completely irrational thought, but it was seen as an entity, like a monster or an alien invasion more so than an invisible and thoughtless contagion which began out of a wet market in China from people eating pangolins or bats, they say. The result of humans slaughtering and eating animals of some sort. Same old story. This was the animals fighting back, maybe you’d look at it if you were an animal, or an animal-type person. It was nature balancing out the world. It was God punishing people for being ungrateful or for whatever cause you choose to believe in. Maybe it is for the babies the world kills because we don’t want them. The excess. The unwanted. Or the bombs we drop on women and children because they live in the wrong country or worship the wrong God. Or maybe it has not a goddamn thing to do with anything and it is just happening because it is just happening. Maybe it was fated or it wasn’t. Meant to be, or by chance. And maybe it will go away and never come back. Or maybe it will stay and they will never find a vaccine. Maybe this is extinction, act one. Who knows.

Tom parked on the street, sung a bar of “Lovely Rita,” fairly sure meter cops wouldn’t be checking meters for the foreseeable future, though this is New York, he reminded himself glibly. He looked up at the building for a moment. It was ten or so in the morning. He had driven through the night, making only the one stop near Altoona at the space station. He thought about all the times he and his ex parked here and made out, or waited for a rain to lessen before they went inside. There was the time she had a nosey roommate they sought to avoid. This car had been their sanctuary and this was their spot. He could tell by its view of the building. He knew this was the exact spot by the chipped paint of the parking meter that looked like an angry, disapproving face. This was her apartment. He sat there in his car and took a breath and looked over at the bear who looked ahead at the raindrops that began to fall on the windshield one by one.

“Your first time to the big city! You’ve been a good riding buddy, bear. I appreciate the conversation. But I don’t think you or I will be having many more deep and contemplative conversations in our near future. Maybe there will come a time, but, who knows. Tomorrow is never promised, is it? Don’t answer. It’s a rhetorical question. Your life is one of purpose and being so your purpose in this world is to make a little girl happy and there isn’t much greater a role in this world than that. I hope the faith I have invested in you, picking you over all other toys and all other bears who seemed to be just like you, is faith well spent. I had a good feeling about you from the moment I saw you. So,” he cleared his throat, “from this point forward, we will go into that apartment and you will have to give up all curiosities of contagions, and World Wars, and politics, and the affairs of forty-something men and women, or whatever else we happened to discuss along the way that I have failed to mention. I would make you sign a waiver of some kind, but I don’t think that will be necessary. Will it? Don’t answer.

“You will now be the taster of the finest imaginary teas the world has to offer, a fashion model of the finest fashions, an actor, a confidant, a psychologist, a bodyguard, but most importantly, the true love of a beautiful little girl. Her name is Beatrice. I can’t give you any more information on her other than that, well, because, sadly, I don’t know anything else. I don’t even have a picture to show you. I know. I wish I did. Well, it would be presumptuous of us to carry up a car full of groceries before we have introduced ourselves, so let’s just go ourselves and hope for the best. Take it as it comes.” 

With that, Tom unfastened his and the bear’s belt. He made his way inside the building. There was no door man where there used to be one. There was an empty stool where he sat because he was old and his name was Arthur. Arthur fought a war in Korea. He was probably dead because he was 80 years-old four years ago when Tom last saw him and if the virus hadn’t got him, time probably had. Maybe they hired someone else or just kept the stool there in remembrance. Tom liked to think it was the former.

He took the stairs. It was only four flights. Maybe he did so just to prolong the climax. Or to postpone the inevitable. There wasn’t a sound in the stairwell. It was so quiet he could hear the bear breathe and his feet plop one by one on a different concrete rung. It wasn’t cold, nor warm, and there was no faint and lingering smell of someone else who had just came or went. It felt hollow and empty, like no one had ever walked through it. When he got to the fourth floor he opened the door and walked down the hall. It was as he remembered, no worse for wear, no better. Same ceramic-tile floor. Different smell. An absence of smell, really. It smelled more like cardboard and less like curry and oregano and boiled onions. He had supposed he would see stacks of bodies somewhere from what he had heard on the news, but he didn’t see anything so terrible. But eerily he heard almost nothing, so walking down the once-lively hallway, as he recalled it, was like walking through a tomb. He had the abstract thought that he was the germ of the virus in the body and at any moment antibodies would try futilely to repel him. It would make for a good story, he thought. But that thought and a hundred more came and went by the time he got to the right door. 466.

He remembered her writing it down when they met. They met in a bar in Greenwich Village. Someplace he didn’t want to be, but it was open mic night and a good friend he worked with wanted him to come to hear a story he was going to read. Literary types would be there, the guy promised. But Tom was beginning to feel anxious and nervous in large groups of people, which he was treating with alcohol. His friend’s short story was something daring about boobs or menstrual cycles. He couldn’t recall now, but one or the other. Maybe penises or testicles. And there she was in the bar with a piece of paper in her jittery pale hands reading over it. It was a poem. A simple poem and she was going to read it. She was also there with a friend or two and drinking shots of whiskey and chasing them with swills of Belgian beer. 

He stood there at the door staring at the brass numbers, 466, still thinking of that night. If someone had been looking at him through the peephole they would have thought he lost his mind because he was grinning like someone who had gone mad, or who was high on a powerful inhalant whose main side-effect is a fantastical unnatural contortion that charaded as an awkward ear-to-ear grin. He appeared to be simpering, she called it.

“I don’t know what that means,” he said in the memory.

“When I was reading my poem,” she brushed her raven-black hair back from her eyes and had another sip of her beer, “You appeared to be simpering. It means to smile coyly, or ingratiatingly.”

“Oh. Well, I was smiling because I enjoyed the poem. And the person who was reading it.”

She blushed inadvertently.

“There was something very visceral about the poem,” he went on. “Very raw and personal. I didn’t hear much of that tonight at all, except from you. Everyone was trying to be funny, or cool, or to show they care about some damn cause more than the next person, but there you were, talking about yourself and bees. You were kind of the only one out there who bared her soul. I don’t know much of writing and poetry, but isn’t that the purpose. And you did so in eight brilliant lines.”

“Nine,” she corrected him, hoping it didn’t sound peremptory.

“Nine,” he replied. “My favorite number.”

“Mine is eight,” she smiled back.

“May I buy you a drink?” he asked.

“How about eight? Or nine?”

“I work in the morning,” he replied. They laughed a little and sat alone at a table, a couple castaways. But as much as they were alone, they were the subject of stares and giggles and jokes from their friends that didn’t affect them at all. He only stopped looking at her to not be drowned by her, or drowned on her, and to listen to his friend’s story about boobs. It was about boobs. From breastfeeding to current day and it didn’t play well at first amongst the Greenwich Village elite, as could be expected, but the self-deprecating and folksy way his friend told it ingratiated the storyteller to the audience and “Being Benny Hill” turned out to be alright.

But Tom couldn’t care less for boobs or friends or drinks because he was enamored with the poet who worked unhappily in an accounting firm on W. 64th, who loved bees, and had short chopped hair that she cut herself. She said she had to go by eleven, but before she did she wrote the address number down on a piece of paper. But only the apartment number. The rest she left up to Tom to remember.

“If it is meant to be, you won’t forget. Surely you can remember the street name and address. I am free Sunday. We can make pancakes. Come by and surprise me.”

“What’s your number?”

“Oh, Tom! Don’t bore me. You were doing so, so well. Don’t be so ordinary! If I would have given you my number that would be indicative of a lack of certainty or interest on my part. Wouldn’t it? It would have screamed that I have some trepidation and I still yet need to screen you through a series of phone calls or text messages to make sure you are worthy of my time when I thought we established through the course of our discourse and eye contact that you most definitely are. Phones and texting and all that is hackneyed, and often I wish it did not exist for it makes people so predictable and painfully dull. It’s played out. I prefer antique stores to Pottery Barn and any old greasy spoon in the Bronx to Starbuck’s in Manhattan. Phones have had their day like pagers and telegraphs. I am still fond of letters, though. Ones with hidden meanings. Aphorisms. Allegories. Et cetera, and so forth. I also love unexpected visits. You know, do drop-ins. Or the I was in the neighborhoods. I gave you my legitimate address, Tom. What more can a gentleman want from a lady?”

“What if I am not a gentleman. What if I’m Ted Bundy.”

“Then that, good sir, would be fate. And I am fine with fate, even when it’s not to my favor.” She left for a moment, but then thinking of something else vital to say, she hurried back to quickly say it before she was abandoned by her friends. “And I just so happen to know that Ted Bundy fried in the electric chair at Raiford Prison in 1989. I watched it with my mum. Bon jour!”

He sat at the table when she left and smiled, her vapors dancing in the ballrooms that became his nostrils. Two empty shot glasses of whiskey sat before him along with three or four of those stout Belgian Beer bottles with only warm suds puddling in the bottom like chess pieces of a game spent. Also there was her copy of the poem she wrote, which he folded and put in his pocket for posterity. He had her at the advantage, but she withdrew. No, he reconsidered it. She was at the advantage because he was in love with her and she was in love with only the moment, fate, and destiny, or so he presumed. We don’t exactly know what others think or feel. It is all a guessing game. 

So there he stood back in modern time with the thought of that little piece of paper in his hand. 466 was all she gave him, the rest she mentioned once verbally and had he not been keen and paying attention, he would not have known what street she lived on and in what building. It had been a test of sorts and here he was some four years later, still holding on to that imaginary piece of paper, waiting to knock. He wasn’t lacking courage or hope, he was simply postponing the moment, reveling in it like foreplay, for better or worse, to climax. He was in deep contemplation. But then a door popped open a few apartments down and a frantic head popped out into the hallway looking both ways until she saw Tom and Tom saw her. It was a young woman with fluffy yellow hair who appeared frightened at the sight of him and the bear the way Goldilocks must have been frightened at the sight of the three bears. She quickly went back inside and shut the door and latched it as though Tom, the bear, or both, might race over to eat her.

Other than the sound of that door shutting, there was nothing. Not a whisper or a fart, and the peculiarity of the deafening silence was largely due to the lack of any traffic outside. New York City was dead on the surface, all the bees were hived, and all that was left of noise was the occasional desperate dog barking, the whirring of a patrol car, the screaming sirens of ambulances every now and then, or the strange wind and the birds which had not been heard in the city since probably around 1847 or so.

Tom looked at bear and bear looked at Tom. Then he bit his lip and knocked. Three quick and steady raps. Then there was, in reply, a soft voice that said, “Who’s there?” only it sounded more like “hoos hare” and Tom knew the small voice to be that of Baby Beatrice. Toddler Beatrice, rather. He had seen her on YouTube celebrate her 3rd birthday with a Peppa Pig-themed party and on posts on Facebook when he looked for them. He watched her in still motion blow out birthday candles every year and reach new milestones. He didn’t know how to reply to her now, so he knelt down to her level and spoke through the keyhole, hoping not to sound like a creepy stranger.

“I’m a friend of your mommy’s, Beatrice. I’m here to help you.”

“One second. I’ll have to go ask my mommy.”

Tom waited at the keyhole with his hand on the door. He could hear her feet patter across the floor.

“Mommy’s sleeping. Come back later.”

“Beatrice, honey, I’ve brought someone to meet you. Only he doesn’t have a name. He is small and furry or fuzzy, I don’t know which because I don’t know the difference between fur and fuzz. But he is soft and cuddly and he needs a name. He and I have come a long way to see you, and we’ve brought pancakes.”

There was a long pause in which he could practically hear her think. “Are you the pancake maker?”

Tom smiled, knowing that is how her mom must have explained him. “Yes. I’m the pancake maker.”

A few seconds later he could hear the grating of a heavy chair slide slowly across the wood floor. Then the laborious unlatching of several locks and the flailing of falling chains along with the girl grunting and groaning as she did her labor. It was a big accomplishment for such small hands. But then when she got to the deadbolt she grunted and groaned and cried out that she couldn’t open it. But Tom had the key and he gently slid it into the lock and turned it until it clicked. He was happy she hadn’t changed the locks, though he knew that she wouldn’t. She wasn’t the type who changes locks.

Then at last the door opened with a dramatic creak, thudded against the wood chair before the girl pushed it aside to meet Tom and bear. She smiled as though she knew both, but she had never met either of them. Her hair was long and messy and her face was still chubby with baby fat. She was a gorgeous girl. Her eyes looked like her mother’s, big brown like whiskey barrels, and the rest of her resembled her father. Tom shut the door behind him and put his hand on her forehead. She didn’t feel hot. She apparently had dressed herself for she was wearing pink pajamas, a purple tutu, several different cat and poodle hair barrettes messily in her hive of hair, rainbow socks on her arms, kitten gloves, a white cashmere scarf, and pink rainboots.

She looked up at Tom and then at the bear and he woke up from a daydream and let her have him. Sunlight filtered in through the front room window through the decorative pores of ivory-white crocheted curtains. Same curtains from four years ago. Beatrice giggled and squeezed the bear which was about half her size. “His name is Mr. Fuzzy,” she lisped between two missing teeth. “He told me!”

“Mr. Fuzzy, it is,” Tom replied rubbing her head. He grabbed a cart and hurried to the car to carry in the boxes and then locked it up. Beatrice helped him make pancakes and Mr. Fuzzy sat at the kid’s table with his red ribbon refashioned as a neatly and properly tied bowtie around his neck. Then as promised, Mr. Fuzzy tried exotic teas and waited patiently for his pancake. Tom avoided going into Beatrice’s mother’s room for the memories of it, and for the obvious despair to see her that way in such shape as she would be in. He didn’t know if she was sleeping in this life or the next and well, avoidance was simply a part of Tom’s character until now. Until he came here. This might have been the first thing Tom met head-on in his entire lifetime, other than leaving New York in the first place.

He spent a few hours playing with Beatrice and then when she and Mr. Fuzzy had their stomachs full of pancakes and their breath was redolent with syrup, he slowly ventured into the room with the legerity of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve night. In case she was still alive, which he wasn’t sure of at all, he brought along a mask to amuse her for their relationship was so rarely without gaiety and gags of the sort that now seemed not the time to disrupt the tradition. They shared the same dark sense of humor. But first he checked with Beatrice to make sure the mask didn’t freak her out.

“You look like a bird!” she giggled.

“What kind of bird, Beatrice?”

“A funny bird!” she laughed. “A black bird!”

“Yes. Well, you stay here with Mr. Fuzzy and I’m going to go check on your mommy. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The room was still blue. He had hoped she had painted the walls or something, but she never did. He hoped she had taken down that Jimi Hendrix painting a friend who committed suicide had given her, but she hadn’t. He hoped she had moved the bed to another wall, but it was where it was, and there was still that framed Picasso print above the headboard. The beautiful woman with the long neck and the stripes he called “Brittany Nixon.” It was as though nothing changed at all, everything was waiting for him exactly how it was. Even the lamp. The room was quiet and he could hear Beatrice playing in the front room. The TV was on but he heard her in lulls of silence giggling, teaching Mr. Fuzzy something new about life he didn’t already know. I don’t speak French, Mr. Fuzzy, she blurted angrily. But then she laughed a second later. The bedspread was still the same, a white cotton-twill flock of birds, the impression of abstract gulls against a sky full of wispy clouds.

A small bronze desk lamp was on with an amber-colored bulb radiating under a stained-glass shade that looked like a tulip. The desk was where she wrote her poems. There were piles of paper and a laptop which was closed, buried in post-it note ideas and socks and underwear. There was a glass mason jar of seashells from a beach somewhere. There were plates of uneaten toast and cups and cups of water on end tables and on the floor and the TV stand. The TV was new. She never had that when Tom was there. There was the empty royal-blue highback chair by the bed where it always was as though standing guard, waiting to be released from the obligation of its duty. It is as though that chair has some hopes and dreams, he once remembered her saying to him when she bought it from a flea market in Islip. She is high society, one of those fancy Orleans ladies, she went on in some kind of absurd accent that made Tom laugh. He smiled through the bird mask at the memory, hearing his own breath grow louder as he crept closer to her.

She lay perfectly still with her hands folded over her chest, the golden watchful light of the bronze lamp carefully painting the curve of her face, and the dying light of another day out the window streaming through in a purple haze that lay itself lazily across the room. It was as though she were Snow White without the glass encasement and had only eaten a bad apple. He sat in that Orleans lady chair’s lap and swallowed pensively. He reached out and put the back of his hand on her forehead. She was warm with fever, but very much alive. Taking deep and shallow breaths. Her eyes fluttered open and she turned her head towards him.

“Have you come to take me to the underworld my winged harbinger of death?” she declared, sounding like a sophomore hamming up her only line in the high school play. She couldn’t help but to smile.

“I have no wings. Only a beak, miss.”

“Some bird you are then,” she sighed.

“I’m not a bird. I’m a plague doctor,” he countered, removing the mask.

“Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Your humor hasn’t improved so much.”

“Bought it for one of those renaissance festivals one year. Thought I was original, but there were at least two dozen other people who had the same idea and costume. Walked around like a damn flock of fools with a plastic cup of awful mead and some wild greasy bird that tasted like my grandmother’s leg.”

She laughed in obvious pain, coughing into her elbow. “You know the taste of your grandmother’s leg?”

“I clarify. As I’d imagine it would taste,” he smiled.

“I don’t think I ever even saw my grandmother’s leg. No. Not once,” she considered. “She may have had pegs or prosthetics for all that I know. And here I thought you were a vegetarian.”

“When in Rome...”

“Touché. What the hell are you doing here, Tom? I haven’t seen you in four years. And here you come waltzing in when I’m on death’s door with one foot in. Haven’t you watched the news, lately?”

“Martha dear, you know I’ve never been fond of the TV news. Or the CDC, or the WHO, or mandates of any sort. And the Surgeon General turned me off when he condemned cigarettes.”

“You don’t smoke.”

“Still, I like the idea that someday I might and could do so without condemnation.”

“Well, newsflash, Buster Brown, you were safe in Ohio, or wherever you were, but you’re not safe here. You just strolled into Dante’s Inferno in a gasoline bikini. You’re breathing in your own death and your lungs will be like Niagara Falls. This is ground zero.”

“Well, rats. Just my luck.”

She smiled at him and reached for his hand. “It’s suicide, Tom.”

“I know. Isn’t it wonderful? What better a way to go?”

“Not if you knew how it feels.”

“Weren’t you always fond of Romeo and Juliet, dear?”

She smiled. “Who are they? Friends of yours?”

“I thought you might appreciate that I remembered your address. Dropped in. I was in the neighborhood, you could say. And I thought to call or text, but that is trite, so in the interest of originality and romance, et cetera, et cetera, I came on whim. With the wind.”

“Better late than never, I suppose.”

“I thought so.”

“I didn’t think you liked the big city, Tom.”

“It’s more like a midget these days.”

“Speaking of midgets. I’m assuming you met your daughter.”

“I did. She’s beautiful. She made a friend.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Fuzzy. I picked him up in a gas station in Altoona. They’re playing together in the front room.”

“Is he civilized?”

“Indeed.”

“Well, he can stay then. She is beautiful. And perfect. She’s been playing doctor to her mum. Everyday I get either toast, crackers, or dried cereal, and fresh water or juice. Been this way for a week or so. There is going to be a whole generation of kids who are going to be some damn tough people. Tougher than those boomers even. Fine doctors. Theirs will be quite a generation because they’ve endured so much already and will endure even more before they’re grown.”

Tom could hear Beatrice giving Mr. Fuzzy a thorough examination. She wrote him out a prescription for his whooping cough and earache.

“It’s the strangest thing,” Martha sighed. “It doesn’t hurt kids, you know. Not fatally, anyway. Of the millions who’ve died, there’s only been a few kids who had some underlying conditions beforehand. You shouldn’t have come, Tom. You’re going to get it and you might die, too.”

“Nonsense. I planned to come back, you know. I always planned to. I just assumed there was someone else. That Beatrice would have another dad and the city, well, you know...”

“You don’t have to explain. Not anymore.”

“I can die, Martha. I just could never have lived if I hadn’t come back.”

“You never liked New York, I know. And I didn’t like Ohio.”

“You’ve never been to Ohio...”

“I don’t think you have to go somewhere to not like it. It seems so drab. I guess I thought you didn’t love me enough to like New York. And so maybe you could say I didn’t love you enough to like Ohio. But that’s all wrong. Hell, I thought to come to see you and meet your mom before she passed, introduce her to Bee, but I waited for a sign I didn’t get. It was never in the cards.”

“How’s a global pandemic for a sign?”

She laughed. “Now we’re going to die and leave the kid with Mr. Fuzzy. Is he father material?”

“No. Not exactly. But how should I know?” he cringed.

“Stop, Tom. Don’t beat yourself up. You were meant to leave and meant to come back, which is why I didn’t cry when you walked away. I expected you to. I had card readings that said you were going to go and readings that said you were going to come back. We do exactly what we are fated to do. We only have the illusion of choice.”

“Um.”

“You remember that Sunday, Tom. That Sunday you came over for the first time. You brought pancakes and blueberries and chocolate chips and, well, I don’t know how many different kinds of syrups because you weren’t sure which I liked, but several. Whole grocery sack you lugged up from the market and a bouquet of flowers on top. We made love after pancakes, drunk on syrup, middle of the day. Lazy, warm, breezy September Sunday. Took a walk in the park after. Saw a movie. Ate dinner in that greasy spoon on 57th. That Italian place with the red-and-white awning. Went back home and made love again watching the second game of a Yankees’ doubleheader. They were playing the Indians, your team, and we said whoever won is where we would live. Bottom of the ninth, fans on their feet, Gardner singles home the winning run on a 2-2 pitch at the ankles. Right back up the box. And I gave you the key. It was perfect. First date and we were already picking out baby names and color patterns for the nursery. I guess I figured I scared you away, you must have thought I was crazy, but you hung in there ten or eleven months and you knew how much I wanted a baby. Not that you knew in there,” she sighed weakly pointing to his forehead. “But in there,” pointing to his heart. “But I was so sure. So, so sure. Everything made sense with you like it hadn’t made sense with anyone else before. You were my weirdo, and I was happy to be yours in return. We were each other’s honey.”  

Tom sighed and began to cry as he looked down at the bird mask in his hands that looked back at him. It was a vacant look. He saw his reflection in the eyes. Briefly, he thought of that renaissance festival. It was the first summer back in Ohio after one year in New York and nearly one year with Martha. He went with a girl he had met on some dating site. Some unoriginal damn dating site. Some grotty and disagreeable date with someone absurd who was afraid to smile, or to be strange in the least, who didn’t dress in costume for the festival and who was embarrassed in a disdainful way that he did. Someone he has most entirely forgotten other than the faint gray shadowy blur that becomes of such dreadfully ordinary people in the rot of memory.

Beatrice opened the door and the light and sound of the TV spilled into the darkening bedroom. “Mr. Pancake Maker,” she whispered urgently. “I’m getting hungry.” Only there was no “r” in her hungry, so it was, adorably, “hun-gy.”

Tom smiled and Martha raised up in bed and patted the space beside her to get Beatrice to come. And the girl ran to her mom and jumped up on the bed like a dog-show dog. “I told her about you. That her father was the pancake maker.”

“It’s a good name to have.”

“It’s a title, really,” Martha returned. “Like a king. Maybe better than a king. You know how she got her name, Mr. Pancake Maker?” Martha asked, petting Beatrice’s silky hair as the little girl smiled and curled up into a contented pillbug-like ball.

“No. I don’t.”

“I love the name Beatrice, but I named her that because when I was young I had an unnatural love of bees. I would let them sting me, but after a while they stopped stinging me. It was like they accepted me. Remember my poem from the bar where we met. It was about bees, only it was a little despairing. Those weren’t the kind of bees I was in love with that I wrote about then. So, anyway, I like to call her Bee. Her room, she will show you I am sure, is decorated in bee things. I painted the ceiling to resemble a honeycomb. She will need a keeper, Tom. Another extraordinary title, if you’re up to it.”

“I am.”

“Bee, honey, go into the other room while ‘The Beekeeper’ and I finish our talk.”

The little girl got up and did as she was told. She smiled happily at Tom who added, “I’ll make you dinner in a minute, Bee. Pancakes again?”

She shook her head enthusiastically and darted off into the front room to tell Mr. Fuzzy what was for dinner.

“We’re not expected to live, you know. Our chances are slim. What I worry about is Beatrice. Where will all the children go?”

“God takes care of such things and miracles happen everyday. Would you like blueberry or chocolate chip? Maple syrup or Aunt Jemima?”

“Surprise me,” Martha smiled.  

And so he did. Every day for the next six weeks, Tom surprised Martha. He got sick around Easter, but Martha was well again and took over. She recovered unexpectedly. Then Beatrice got sick in May, but true to form of the virus not being highly fatal to children, she soon recovered and the family lived a very happy life for the next thirteen years.

A few years after the virus disappeared, Mr. Fuzzy graduated medical school and became Dr. Fuzzy before he was accidentally left on the subway, or in other words, before he moved to South America to treat the indigenous people of Bolivia who were suffering a terrible illness that came from foolishly eating bats or pangolins. Dr. Fuzzy didn’t stop there. He traveled the world, it seemed, and he wrote letters of his travels and his adventures in medicine to Beatrice, one every week, until she was around 12 and no longer seemed to need those letters anymore. Then, after a hiatus, he wrote again when she was 17 and suffered a broken heart that only Dr. Fuzzy could remedy.

Martha slipped away that year. She got cancer and lost the battle in early September. The year before her death, she wrote a collection of poems called The Beekeeper and gifted two self-published copies, the only two in existence, to Tom and Bee. She passed on one of those lazy, warm, breezy September Sundays. She was at home and ate pancakes with her family before fate carried her away in the wind to wherever it goes. She would be proud to know that Beatrice graduated from Columbia and became a doctor, a pediatrician, just as she had prognosticated the year of the virus when there was a scarcity of toilet paper and when Tom came home. Tom never lost that sad poem Martha recited in that bar the night they met. Unlike her collection of poems in The Beekeeper, it was somber and he was glad he changed her life in such a way. He reads it now and then, and keeps it folded up, the bookmark for her beautiful book.  
 
Bee Eye


I have expectant eyes of fate
where bees freely traverse
and tears of honey flow.
With a queen, sacked in the pupil,
who counts days and men that go.
She waits for their return
with no expectation or compunction.
And when they’re lost,
she shows not the least concern.