Later she remembered dying, though she wasn’t sure it was possible to remember something like that.
What she actually remembered was being aware that her heart had stopped. Before that, she remembered lying in the grass, dimly aware of a pulse. She felt it in her ears, rapid and irregular, like Morse code—dot, dot, dash, dot—the dashes being missed beats. Then it was gone.
At first she thought she might simply have lost track of it. She’d often listened to her heartbeat as a meditation technique. If she was still and paid attention, she could feel the blood pulse in her ears, her chest, her clasped hands. Lying there, she searched for it. That’s how she realized it had stopped.
Then she noticed she wasn’t breathing.
Her next thought was that she must tell her husband about this. He would be interested in her experience of death, for she was pretty sure, from their discussions over the years, that he thought consciousness died with the body. Yet here she was, aware not only of a before but also an after.
The during part, however, was vague: one of those silly synchronicities involving cars, trucks, and highway medians.
She remembered the argument they’d had before she’d left: the things she’d said, the things he’d said.
They’d gone in two directions: He went as usual to his beloved bees. She got in the car. Why had she done that? Usually when she needed to compose herself, she went for a walk or sat on the porch and thought. It had been a mistake to drive. She understood that now. What she wanted more than anything was to go back and change her words. She didn’t want those to be her last words to him. But there it was. She’d said them, and now she could not unsay them. Perhaps, though, she could still go home and tell him that she loved him, that she regretted the words.
Two thoughts occurred to her at once: That, being dead, she wouldn’t be able to communicate with him; that a veil of emptiness now hung between them. And that it seemed impossible she was having any thoughts at all. She no longer had a functioning body, let alone a brain. Who or what was doing all this thinking?
Did it matter so much how she was doing it? She knew that the jump from neurons to thoughts wasn’t well understood. She knew it was a mystery how, or even if, consciousness emerged from the morass of brain cells—and that had never stopped anyone from thinking. Why should it trouble her that her disembodied mind continued to think?
No, the more troubling problem was how to communicate with her husband.
She longed to hold him and be held by him. She saw him lying in their bed. Or was it just a memory? When she went to lie beside him, she discovered he was like air, or the idea of air. She moved closer, and then she was inside him. She remembered once lifting a box that she’d thought was full, but it had been empty, and she’d nearly thrown it into the air. It was like that as she leaned into him. She expected the usual resistance, the soft settling against his warm body, but then she kept going. She was dark matter zinging through anything it encountered. He appeared to have no sense of her presence, just lying there in the night, maybe asleep, maybe awake.
How had she gotten there? She had simply thought of him, and there she was beside him, with him, in him. She thought of her birthplace, and she was there. She thought of the moon, and she was on its dusty lunar surface, which was more expansive and rugged than she’d imagined. She thought of Earth, and she was back. She thought of their yard, and there she was, and he was there too, opening his hives and telling the bees about her.
So this was disembodiment. Unencumbered by space, she could be wherever she set her mind to be. Yet, despite this new capacity, she could not communicate with her husband—now no longer, technically speaking, her husband but a widower—though he was right there in the bee yard, telling the bees she had died.
It was an old tradition he had once told her about: When there was a death in the household, the beekeeper would go out to tell the bees about it. The thought was that, if the bees were not told, they would abscond. They were members of the family. Their feelings would be hurt if they were overlooked.
So he was doing it. Telling them. Romantic fool.
She followed him into the apiary. Was followed the right word? Or was she just thinking of being there? The questions cycled through her mind, and she kept chewing on them like an old piece of gum, or a chunk of beeswax. Was she actually seeing all of this or just remembering it? She was not seeing in a conventional way. She felt auras, sensed something ricochet back from the world, like sonar, only it wasn’t sound vibrations but a sort of energy. There were shapes, or what she took to be shapes, and colors, though not the colors she was used to.
She remembered having similar experiences in dreams. And dreams happen without eyes—or, at least, without open eyes. Dreams are memories of visual experiences. Was this real, then, or was she dreaming? It felt like dreaming. She began to suppose that’s what it was. She was dreaming about the real world that she’d left behind. Only she was still there. Sort of. Everything felt slightly beyond her grasp, like it was happening behind thick plexiglass.
As a child she’d had a frightful dream of being buried alive, but in such a way that she could still see what was going on up at the surface. She could see and hear her family there, but they couldn’t see or hear her. She was cut off, below the ground, and she could not tell them she was still alive. Remembering the nightmare from childhood, she was even more frightened now than she had been then, for in life she’d grown accustomed to her capacity to affect others and be affected by them. She was, or had been, a woman in late middle age, in the glorious habit of agency and touch. Now she couldn’t even blow in her husband’s ear. She’d tried. She had no breath.
So she watched him instead. It amused her that he followed his old routines despite her absence. Did he seem sad, lonely? She couldn’t say. She did not want him to be lonely. She would have liked a little reassurance that maybe he missed her, despite her words, despite his. But she couldn’t tell.
At night he hugged a cold pillow in sleep. He rose with the alarm at five, like they’d always done, duckwalked to the bathroom in the dark, trickle-peed into the toilet, washed his face, drank his water, did his stretches. The coffee had been prepped the night before, and the timer turned it on automatically. Exercises done, he poured himself a cup and went to the living room to read the paper. An hour later he showered, dressed, ate breakfast, and went to the basement to tinker in his workshop. He moved old honeycomb frames around on the bench, tacked a nail here and there by way of repair, rubbed tung oil on hive boxes to weatherproof them, rearranged empty jars. Then, in late morning, when the air outside was warm, he went to visit the bees.
How many times had she seen him in the bee yard but not really seen him? She’d seen that he was there, of course, but not what he was doing. It appeared simple enough: removing the lid from a box, waving the smoker over the top, removing the frames, looking at the bees on the frames, returning the frames to the box, covering it with the lid, opening another. For the first time she saw the bees much as he saw them, or she thought she did. They moved like a liquid, a dark ooze that covered the combs and flowed around the edges. And she made out individual bees within the mass, moving this way and that, poking their heads in and out of individual cells, meeting each other, kissing, or just standing around waiting.
A forager bee back from the field was turning around rapidly, dizzyingly, vibrating all the while. Her husband had explained the bees’ waggle dance to her once—how they used it to communicate. But wasn’t there supposed to be a straight-line run whose duration and direction somehow signaled the location of a resource—a patch of trees with nectar, say, or a field of clover? She noticed another bee, and another, all dancing in circles like dogs chasing their tails. There was no direction. What did it mean? That the nectar was right there beside the hive? That they were crazy? Perhaps the hive was dying, and this was some sort of neurological spasming. Her husband watched the bees circle, curious, and then he looked up, as if to find the nectar source. He looked back at the bees, still circling. He returned the frame to the box, closed the hive, opened another, and there, too, the foragers were circling.
He’d always said that bees were a mystery. He told her that if she ever caught him being certain about anything related to bees, to doubt him, for certainty was scarce, with bees and with life. Mystery was more accurate. Why had he not thought of that when they were fighting? Why did he not think of that now, when she was just there beside him? Perhaps this was one of those uncertainties. But the circling bees knew what they were doing.
He had been aimless since the accident. And so, she thought, had she. In life she’d been disciplined, undistracted, able to take on a project and work it to completion. Now she had one thought after another, and since the thoughts took her to their related places, she was shifting through space as fast as she could think. None of this was helping solve the problem of reconnecting with her husband. Indeed, as her thoughts bounced around the cosmos, she wondered whether she was becoming less and less herself.
What had they fought about? She could barely remember. It probably had to do with money. In nearly four decades of marriage, they’d resolved most of their conflicts—or, at least, learned how to manage them. But money still wedged itself between them. They each liked to spend on whatever they wanted. Who didn’t? The problem was they did not always understand the other’s spending.
Of course, they never worried about his expenditures on bees or hers on books. Those were always legitimate. But a new pair of shoes for her, or a new magazine subscription for him? Neither fully understood the other. Not at first anyway. They had to have words.
“What were you thinking?” he’d asked.
“What do you think I was thinking? I was thinking that I’d like it.”
“We can’t afford everything we like.”
“You seem to think we can when it’s something you want.” It had escalated from there.
“I can spend my money as I want,” she’d finally said. “If you don’t like it, I can do it on my own.”
“Then go.” She left. He turned away, toward his bees.
She’d meant only that she could be independent with her cash. She hadn’t meant that she would leave him. But when he’d told her to go, it had sounded like he meant for her to leave their life together. She had been too quick to storm away. By the time she got to the car, she knew what he meant. But her body had gained momentum. She put the car in drive.
Now she watched over him, worried about him, haunted his days and nights like a ghost, or the idea of one.
She’d started to feel that they were interacting with each other. Perhaps, she thought, in his own way, he was feeling this too.
He padded around the house. She followed. He sat in the front room, reading. She occupied an adjacent chair and meditated, looking up every so often to smile at him. Sometimes he looked up from his book—one of hers, she noticed—and seemed to nod at her, as if she’d suggested a fresh cup of coffee.
When he left the house, she rode along beside him in the truck, and he turned on the radio, and they sang along. And when he worked the hives in the apiary, she sat on the truck’s hood and watched, or she gazed out at the trees and pastures and noticed a hawk on a dead branch, or some turkeys grazing at the edges, and she hummed softly to herself.
She didn’t always follow him. Sometimes she remained home when he went out. She lingered by the bed, or sat—if you could call it that—on the living room couch, or wandered around. She looked at the books on the shelves, the art on the walls. There was one framed print, bought on an anniversary trip to Spain: an etching of the ghostly Alhambra. Another piece was of a cityscape shrouded in fog. They’d seen it in a gallery downtown. These were not the most interesting of the artworks, but she liked them best because she and her husband had purchased them together: She’d said she liked it. He’d said, “Let’s get it.” This pleased her. The story of how they’d bought the art was what mattered.
She noticed his closet remained as jumbled as ever, dirty clothes piled on the floor. Hers was unchanged: Shoes in their niches. Sweaters folded and stacked in columns. Shirts, trousers, and dresses hanging from the rod, spaced equally apart. He hadn’t gotten rid of any of it. She wondered if he ever would.
Her study, too, was untouched. Papers remained where she’d left them on the desk. Books remained in stacks on the floor. The coffee cup she liked was still a quarter full. She wondered how long it would be before it evaporated and left a caramel stain on the bottom that would be difficult to clean.
On the table, beside the easy chair, a copy of the beekeeping magazine he subscribed to.
So. He’d been there.
They were riding in the truck again. He was talking to himself. Or maybe he was imagining her there. She answered, and for a time they had a sort of conversation. They rode along the highway, stopped for a soda at a Zippy Mart, and then tooled onward, still talking. She imagined he was listening to what she said, whether he heard her or not. They spoke of trivial things, things they’d read. They were together. Like old times. She sang a song, and he joined in on the chorus. Did this actually happen, or was it just a thought, a fragment of a dream? Either way, it was something. She’d take it.
They were both in the backyard. He was standing among the hives. She was in the air. He’d removed the cover from one of the hives and was pulling out the frames, inspecting them, and putting them back. She was just there. Watching. Enjoying being with him. Enjoying the backyard, with its shrubs and flowers. There was the paper bush she’d planted years before, now ungainly in size. Around the yard’s edge were azaleas and lilacs and dwarf maples and, between them, beds of Lenten roses and phlox. She’d planted all of them. The weeding and trimming were no longer her responsibility.
From one of the hives near where he stood, a great cloud of bees began to emerge. They poured out like beads from a jar and rose into the air. The surge reminded her of the great wildebeest migration they’d seen years ago when they were working in East Africa. She remembered standing on the grassy plain, thinking the animals would look from an airplane like a swarm of insects. And now, seeing the bees as they migrated out of the hive box, she thought of that immense herd of funny-looking cows so long ago. Her mind turned in both directions.
The bees leapt from the hive’s landing board and filled the air. They were everywhere, moving in a great vortex, a cyclone of humming black specks. They encircled her, or the space where she both was and wasn’t—her locationless location. She could feel the thrum of them on all sides. Then she noticed that none of them was flying through her. They filled all the space that was not occupied by her. But was she really there? Could they tell, even if she could not?
She wondered if he would look up and notice their flight pattern, and, if he did, whether he might see her—or, rather, see the negative space unoccupied by the bees, and in that way discern her apparition, her outline, her absence, formed by the bees in the air above the lawn.
Her mind jumped from the wildebeests to a toy she’d played with as a child involving iron shavings and a magnet. The shavings, trapped beneath plastic, radiated around the magnet as she drew it along the clear surface above them. The bees were like those shavings, moving collectively into a pattern created by a magnetic field.
He was watching the bees now, but not in a way that told her he saw the pattern. He saw that the bees were swarming. There were countless numbers of them: Twenty thousand? Thirty? Forty? The swarm, she remembered, consisted of half or more of all the bees in the hive. She knew he’d seen this happen many times before. He’d spoken of it. Called her to see it with him when it had happened. Marveled at the spectacle every time.
He had explained to her that if the swarming bees were joined by the queen, which they usually were, they would coalesce into a huge beard on a branch, and if that branch were low enough, he could shake the clump of them into a box or onto a sheet, and, with luck, they would enter an empty hive as a new colony. Sometimes, however, they landed on a tree branch too high to reach, and he wasn’t able to catch them. Then they would wait for scout bees to find them a new home. They might spend days deciding on a location before they would rise from their clump and go and occupy that empty hollow of a tree or a wall of a house.
If the queen did not emerge, they would return to their old hive to swarm another day.
This time the bees did not coalesce on a branch. They kept swirling and swirling all around her until she was dizzy with their movement. Could it be the queen had died, or was something else preventing the swarming bees from gathering?
Slowly the bees flew back toward the hive. And the image of her they’d made by their absence moved with them. She wondered if they were ushering her into the hive. She could not be sure. Great numbers of them landed on the box, covered it entirely, and then began to stream back into its entrance. And when her attention followed the bees inside, that was where she went too. Was she going in with them or just thinking she was? Was there a difference? She could no longer see him. She didn’t think he’d seen her, out there with the bees. Or if he had, she didn’t think he understood.
