He came back five months later with the first real tan of his life; he was also an inch taller, fifteen pounds lighter, and much quieter. He was still cheerful enough, or could be, but his little-boy exuberance, sometimes infectious, sometimes wearisome, but always there, was gone. He had grown up. And for the first time I remember him talking about the news… how bad it was, I mean. That was 2003, the year a PLO splinter group called the Sons of the Jihad (a name that always sounded to me hideously like a Catholic community service group somewhere in western Pennsylvania) set off a Squirt Bomb in London, polluting sixty per cent of it and making the rest of it extremely unhealthy for people who ever planned to have children (or to live past the age of fifty, for that matter). The year we tried to blockade the Philippines after the Cedeno administration accepted a “small group” of Red Chinese advisors (fifteen thousand or so, according to our spy satellites), and only backed down when it became clear that (a) the Chinese weren’t kidding about emptying the holes if we didn’t pull back, and (b) the American people weren’t all that crazy about committing mass suicide over the Philippine Islands. That was also the year some other group of crazy motherfuckers—Albanians, I think—tried to air-spray the AIDS virus over Berlin.
This sort of stuff depressed everybody, but it depressed the shit out of Bobby.
“Why are people so goddam mean?” he asked me one day. We were at the summer place in New Hampshire, it was late August, and most of our stuff was already in boxes and suitcases. The cabin had that sad, deserted look it always got just before we all went our separate ways. For me it meant back to New York, and for Bobby it meant Waco, Texas, of all places… he had spent the summer reading sociology and geology texts—how’s that for a crazy salad?—and said he wanted to run a couple of experiments down there. He said it in a casual, offhand way, but I had seen my mother looking at him with a peculiar thoughtful scrutiny in the last couple of weeks we were all together. Neither Dad nor I suspected, but I think my mom knew that Bobby’s compass needle had finally stopped swinging and had started pointing.
“Why are they so mean?” I asked. “I’m supposed to answer that?”
“Someone better,” he said. “Pretty soon, too, the way things are going.”
“They’re going the way they always went,” I said, “and I guess they’re doing it because people were built to be mean. If you want to lay blame, blame God.”
“That’s bullshit. I don’t believe it. Even that double-X-chromosome stuff turned out to be bullshit in the end. And don’t tell me it’s just economic pressures, the conflict between the haves and have-nots, because that doesn’t explain all of it, either.”
“Original sin,” I said. “It works for me—it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”
“Well,” Bobby said, “maybe it is original sin. But what’s the instrument, big brother? Have you ever asked yourself that?”
“Instrument? What instrument? I’m not following you.”
“I think it’s the water,” Bobby said moodily.
“Say what?”
“The water. Something in the water.”
He looked at me.
“Or something that isn’t.”
The next day Bobby went off to Waco. I didn’t see him again until he showed up at my apartment wearing the inside-out Mumford shirt and carrying the two glass boxes. That was three years later.
“Howdy, Howie,” he said, stepping in and giving me a nonchalant swat on the back as if it had been only three days.
“Bobby!” I yelled, and threw both arms around him in a bear-hug. Hard angles bit into my chest, and I heard an angry hive-hum.
“I’m glad to see you too,” Bobby said, “but you better go easy. You’re upsetting the natives.”
I stepped back in a hurry. Bobby set down the big paper bag he was carrying and unslung his shoulder-bag. Then he carefully brought the glass boxes out of the bag. There was a beehive in one, a wasps’ nest in the other. The bees were already settling down and going back to whatever business bees have, but the wasps were clearly unhappy about the whole thing.
“Okay, Bobby,” I said. I looked at him and grinned. I couldn’t seem to stop grinning. “What are you up to this time?”
He unzipped the tote-bag and brought out a mayonnaise jar which was half-filled with a clear liquid.
“See this?” he said.
“Yeah. Looks like either water or white lightning.”
“It’s actually both, if you can believe that. It came from an artesian well in La Plata, a little town forty miles east of Waco, and before I turned it into this concentrated form, there were five gallons of it. I’ve got a regular little distillery running down there, Howie, but I don’t think the government will ever bust me for it.” He was grinning, and now the grin broadened. “Water’s all it is, but it’s still the goddamndist popskull the human race has ever seen.”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“I know you don’t. But you will. You know what, Howie?”
“What?”
“If the idiotic human race can manage to hold itself together for another six months, I’m betting it’ll hold itself together for all time.”
He lifted the mayonnaise jar, and one magnified Bobby-eye stared at me through it with huge solemnity. “This is the big one,” he said. “The cure for the worst disease to which Homo sapiens falls prey.”
“Cancer?”
“Nope,” Bobby said. “War. Barroom brawls. Drive-by shootings. The whole mess.
Where’s your bathroom, Howie? My back teeth are floating.”
When he came back he had not only turned the Mumford tee-shirt right-side out, he had combed his hair—nor had his method of doing this changed, I saw. Bobby just held his head under the faucet for awhile then raked everything back with his fingers.
He looked at the two glass boxes and pronounced the bees and wasps back to normal. “Not that a wasps’ nest ever approaches anything even closely resembling ‘normal,’ Howie. Wasps are social insects, like bees and ants, but unlike bees, which are almost always sane, and ants, which have occasional schizoid lapses, wasps are total full-bore lunatics.” He smiled. “Just like us good old Homo saps.” He took the top off the glass box containing the beehive.
“Tell you what, Bobby,” I said. I was smiling, but the smile felt much too wide. “Put the top back on and just tell me about it, what do you say? Save the demonstration for later. I mean, my landlord’s a real pussycat, but the super’s this big bull dyke who smokes Odie Perode cigars and has thirty pounds on me. She—”
“You’ll like this,” Bobby said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all—a habit as familiar to me as his Ten Fingers Method of Hair Grooming. He was never impolite but often totally absorbed. And could I stop him? Aw shit, no. It was too good to have him back. I mean I think I knew even then that something was going to go totally wrong, but when I was with Bobby for more than five minutes, he just hypnotized me. He was Lucy holding the football and promising me this time for sure, and I was Charlie Brown, rushing down the field to kick it. “In fact, you’ve probably seen it done before—they show pictures of it in magazines from time to time, or in TV wildlife documentaries. It’s nothing very special, but it looks like a big deal because people have got these totally irrational prejudices about bees.”
And the weird thing was, he was right—I had seen it before.
He stuck his hand into the box between the hive and the glass. In less than fifteen seconds his hand had acquired a living black-and-yellow glove. It brought back an instant of total recalclass="underline" sitting in front of the TV, wearing footie pajamas and clutching my Paddington Bear, maybe half an hour before bedtime (and surely years before Bobby was born), watching with mingled horror, disgust, and fascination as some beekeeper allowed bees to cover his entire face. They had formed a sort of executioner’s hood at first, and then he had brushed them into a grotesque living beard.