Moji lifted the hat off her face, and a bee that had been troubling her reassessed the situation and flew off in the direction of the nearest bloom. The sky had turned a darker blue, and the air was cooler. She brushed her cheek with her hand. I looked at her, and found her puzzling. She was too tall, and her eyes were small. Her face was dark, so dark that it had faint purple notes in it, but she was not beautiful in the way I expected dark women to be. You know what I know about bees? she said all of a sudden, breaking into my thoughts. That the name Africanized killer bees is a piece of racist bullshit. Africanized killers: as if we don’t have enough to deal with without African becoming a shorthand for murderous. She leaned forward to pluck a grape from its stem on the plate. She was wearing a tank top, and I caught sight of the dark curve of her breast.
Around the country, I said, bees are dying and the scientists don’t know why. I’ve always found bees inscrutable. They are obsessed in ways that elude humans, and now they are falling prey to mass death. It has something to do with weather patterns or pesticides, I think, or perhaps some genetic change is at the heart of it. Already, one in every three bees has died, and more are to follow; the percentage is increasing all the time. For so long, I said, they have been used as machines for making honey, their obsession was turned to human advantage. Now they are proving adept at dying, too, dying from some terrible disorder in the order Hymenoptera.
There were nods and smiles. Lise-Anne looked at me with some admiration, and my friend mocked me with his eyes. Moji said she’d read something about the phenomenon, that it was called colony collapse disorder. It is quite widespread by now, she said, common all over Europe and North America, even as far as Taiwan. And isn’t it something also to do with genetically modified maize? My friend put his head in Lise-Anne’s lap, and said, That sounds like something out of imperial history: colony collapse disorder! The natives are restless, Your Majesty, we can’t hold on to these colonies much longer. Lise-Anne said, Does any of you know El Espíritu de la Colmena? It’s a film by a man named Erice, made in the seventies. In that film, bees represent, I don’t know what, but it seems that, in a violent and sad time in Spanish history, they represented a different way of thinking, a way of thinking and being that was specific to bees, but that was related to the human world. There are some scenes in that film that, really, are under my skin now. I think of the ones where the father — he has two young daughters, and one of them is called Ana, just like that little girl who was over there a moment ago — the scenes where the father is kind of shell-shocked, or in the cage of some memory he cannot talk about, and just works at the beehive. Those scenes are very moving, they are without dialogue or plot, but they are effective. Anyway, I don’t know what my point is, but maybe bees are sensitive, unusually sensitive, to all the negativity in the human world. Maybe they are connected to us in some essential way that we haven’t figured out yet, and their death is a warning of some sort to us, like the canaries in a coal mine, sensitive to an emergency that will soon be apparent to dull, slow human beings.
I hadn’t seen Erice’s film, but the collapse of the bee populations made me think of something else, which I now connected to what Lise-Anne had just described. The lack of familiarity with mass death, with plague, war, and famine, seemed to me a new thing in human history. These last few decades, I said to my friends, in which wars flare up in patches instead of being all-consuming, and agriculture no longer evokes elemental fear, and the seasonal variations in weather are not harbingers of starvation, is an anomaly in human history. We are the first humans who are completely unprepared for disaster. It is dangerous to live in a secure world. Look at this harmless and beautiful stunt by the parachutists. We know that they are in the right, right for having made something memorable for us, at some personal risk, but the police are charged with keeping us safe at all times, empowered to secure us with the force of arms, and protect us even from pleasure. I often think of the long nineteenth century, which, in all parts of the world, was one interminable bloodbath, an orgy of continuous killing, whether in Prussia or in the United States, or in the Andes or in West Africa. Butchery was the norm, and nations went to war on the slightest pretexts. And it went on and on, interrupted by brief pauses for rearmament. Think of the epidemics that wiped out ten, twenty, even thirty percent of populations in Europe: I read somewhere recently that the city of Leiden lost thirty-five percent of its population in a five-year period in the 1630s. What could it mean to live with such a possibility, with people of all ages dropping dead around you all the time? The thing is that we have no idea. In fact, when I read it, it was as a footnote in an article talking about something else, an article about painting or furniture.
Families that lost three of their seven members were not at all unusual. For us, the concept of three million New Yorkers dead from illness within the first five years of the millennium is impossible to grasp. We think it would be total dystopia; so, we think of such historical realities only as footnotes. We try to forget that other cities in other times have seen worse, that there isn’t anything that immunizes us from a plague of one kind or another, that we are just as susceptible as any of those past civilizations were, but we are especially unready for it. Even in the way we speak about what little has happened to us, we have already exhausted ourselves with hyperbole.
I’d been going on. It was Lise-Anne who saved me from myself by changing the subject. She said, But, Julius, you’re a shrink. I’ve always wondered about that. I’m obviously crazy, or I wouldn’t be with this guy over here. So never mind the bees or the plague and all that. Who’s the craziest person you’ve treated recently? I bet you get some really whacked-out ones. Or are you sworn to secrecy? We promise not to tell anyone.
I indulged them, and told them stories about my patients, about the alien visitations and government surveillance, the voices in the walls, the suspicions of family conspiracies. There is always a fund of humorous tales from the horror of mental illnesses, particularly in the ranks of the paranoid. I called on these stories now, even passing off some of my colleagues’ patients as my own. My friends laughed as I recalled a case in which the patient had “successfully” jammed signals from other planets, carefully lining every window in her apartment with aluminum foil, placing receptors elaborately woven from paper clips in the soles of her shoes, and always carrying a small piece of lead in each pocket, even when she was asleep. Paranoid schizophrenia lent itself especially well to such narratives, and the sufferers of the disease were good storytellers because they engaged in world building. Within the parameters of their own realities, these worlds were remarkably consistent: they only looked crazy from the outside.