Bees drown noiselessly in honey, without much of a fuss. It is almost as though they are enjoying it — they certainly seem so, in their drunken hesitation, their slow guzzling struggle, the brief flutter and then the stuck wings, the body mired, and at last, gorged on sweetness, they are motionless, dead and darker. It was the look of insects freshly caught in
amber in the Paleozoic, all warmth and softness and smooth sap, and in time they became the black and broken bugs in the brittle fragments of resin. I used to watch the bees and think: This is the way a lush would drown in whiskey, sinking and smiling at the bottom of a still as the bubbles rose to the surface.
Lionberg must have known what I was thinking, because he made a point of marveling at the bees. He claimed he was an amateur beekeeper, but like everything else he did, he was careful and accomplished.
"That's you," Sweetie said, poking at a drowned bee in the depths of the honey puddle. Itwas understood that his life was perfect.
"No," Lionberg said. He smiled. "But I can imagine the feeling."
Now he was dead. Jogging along in sunshine in Kekua's pickup truck, I reflected on my life, beginning with my first misapprehensions. For years, especially your early years, you wonder how you're going to end up. Now I knew I had come to the end of something. Long ago, as a kid, I had seen myself as a fur trapper in the Canadian Arctic, and then as a doctor. In Africa I had imagined myself as an appointed official, or a chancellor of a university. Later, in England, my ambition had been to be lord of the manor — a particular manor in the Marshwood Vale of Dorsetshire. All this time I had been writing. Then my life was fractured. I fled and found myself with fragments of my life, and so swiftly had time passed that I had outstripped my ability to write any of it. And, having exiled myself to the Pacific, starting again with nothing, I suspected that there was no end for me but only a dying fall.
All those years running the Hotel Honolulu, and what had it come to? A rented bungalow in the woods of the North Shore. Rock happy.
"Write a horror book," Sweetie said. "Like Stephen King. He got bucks. And he hurt. You maybe take his place."
I just smiled at her and, as always, pondered her secret infidelities.
"Maybe they make it into one movie. Then you get more bucks."
"I've done that."
She had not known it. She was impressed.
"But I didn't keep the bucks."
"So what happen now?" Sweetie said.
"I'm waiting for a sign."
She understood that; it was how life was lived here. In Hawaii, we were small, like people on a raft. We lived on water, we watched the skies.
On that raft one day my daughter said, "Tell me a story, Daddy."
"I don't know any stories," I said. "Help me. Give me the first sentence."
"Once there was a man on an island," she began.
"He came from far away," I said.
"But what about the island?"
"It was a green island. He said, 'I want to stay here.' So he got a job at a hotel."
"What kind of hotel?"
"Very tall. Lots of stories."
"Tell me all of them," she said.
"Some of them are sad. Some are happy."
"All happy stories are the same," Rose said, wagging her head, pleased with herself. "But every unhappy story is different, unhappy in its own way."
I laughed and hugged her. "I wondered what happened to that book!"
With Rose's encouragement I renewed my old habit of seeing my life as something worth remembering and sharing. All the people I knew, their fortunes and their fate, were part of a bigger design, vivid and memorable because the hotel contained them — not specimens but souvenirs — part of my life.
When JFK Jr. got married, Sweetie had just laughed and said of his bride, "Such a howlie!" He died in a plane crash while I was writing my book — this book full of corpses — and Sweetie was inconsolable, like a sister, like a lover.
People elsewhere said how distant I was, and off the map, but no — they were far away, still groping onward. I was at last where I wanted to be. I had proved what I had always suspected, that even the crookedest journey is the way home.