Of Bees and Mist

by Erick Setiawan

  “You’re simply too generous,” said the young man in a heartfelt voice, which prompted Meridia to bend her head lower still. “What do you think, miss? Would you like to find comfort in me for the rest of your life?”

  Meridia looked up and found herself consumed by something she had never felt before. Not only were the young man’s eyes shining on her, but his entire figure, it seemed, was regarding her with a flame that had singed her earlier. In an instant he made his intention clear. Under his bright gaze she gave the only possible answer.

  “Yes, I would.”

  “The spirits applaud you!” cried the seer. “Now place the coin on the table.”

  Meridia got up, keeping an eye on the young man, and made to search her pocket. Then suddenly, at a sign from him, they both bolted toward the door and shot out of the tent. They ran full speed past the screaming flagellants, upsetting a table of cilices, and had it not been for Meridia’s last-second warning, the young man would have had his eye gouged out by a steel-tipped whip. Behind them the seer shouted angrily, speeding them faster on their flight.

  “You fools! Do you think you can horse around with the spirits? You’ll both pay for this! Mark my words!”

  They ran from Independence Plaza to Majestic Avenue, wove in and out of half a dozen alleys, and did not stop until they reached the market square. Catching their breath under a pepper tree, they laughed and panted and broke out laughing all over again.

  “I didn’t think you’d do it!” exclaimed the young man, winded and incredulous. “I didn’t think you’d follow my lead!”

  “Oh, what have we done?” Meridia laughed and struggled for breath at the same time. “Do you think we’ve angered the spirits?”

  “What spirits? That man is a swindler if I ever saw one! That smoke-and-flame trick he pulled when I walked in is the oldest stunt in the book.”

  “You don’t believe in the spirits then?”

  “Not the ones who put themselves up for sale.” He smiled. “But don’t tell my mother. She’ll have me hanged by the thumb for it.”

  Meridia shyly returned his smile. Before she could stop herself, the question slipped from her mouth. “Were you following the song, too?”

  Amused, the young man clacked his lips. Then slowly, without taking his eyes from her, he shrugged off his dark linen jacket and slung it over his shoulder. Beneath this he wore a vest and a rumpled white shirt, whose sleeves he proceeded to roll unevenly to the elbows.

  “It was your scent I was following,” he said. “I knew you were looking for me.”

  Meridia blushed, thrown off guard by the faint black hairs on his arms. In spite of herself, she followed his long, slender hand as it rose from his thigh, scratched his elbow, and flicked idly at his nose. The movement drew her to his eyes, which blazed and winked at her without warning. Meridia looked away quickly.

  “I wasn’t looking for you,” she managed to stammer. “I was following the crowd around the plaza.”

  “For two days? Even my mother couldn’t last that long at the festival. I was watching you the whole time. One place you never looked was behind you.”

  Feeling her color rise, Meridia seized on his words but carefully avoided his stare. In the gravest voice she asked him:

  “And what were you doing watching me for two days?”

  The young man threw his head back and burst into a laugh. “To see if you would find me. May the spirits forgive you, but yesterday when you stepped on my toes, you not only hobbled me but also stole my heart.”

  He continued laughing, which made it impossible for her to tell if he was serious. She stood about confusedly, not knowing where to rest her hands or her eyes, until his laughter died and he made her promise that she would meet him again the next day.

  SIX

  Daniel was the oldest son of a jeweler. Eighteen and handsome, he was carefree by nature and, rarely distressed, considered himself immune to temper. He was loyal and generous. He saw no faults in those he loved, and despite his share of skepticisms, he believed the world a just and harmonious place. Many in town noted that he moved with a kind of languor, one derived not from idle habits, but from the certainty that in due time, every problem would solve itself. Years later, Meridia would recall that it was this ease that had first attracted her to him, self-possessed and indestructible, as if his waking hours had never been troubled by ghosts or mists.

  On the couple’s first afternoon together, they revisited the plaza abandoned by the spirits. The street performers had reclaimed their spots, dismantling so thoroughly every booth and banner from the festival. Too nervous for words, Meridia occupied herself with the pineapple soda Daniel bought her. A magician was holding the crowd captive that day. He locked a young woman in a box, hacked her into twenty-four pieces, and opened the box to reveal her intact, but with one catch: her head stood upside down on her shoulders! The crowd gasped in horror. Assuring them that all was not lost, the magician passed around his upturned hat, which the crowd eagerly filled to the brim. Meridia held her breath as the magician once again locked the woman inside the box, waved his arms about, and produced her with head corrected. The crowd broke into a raucous applause. Clapping along, Meridia let go of the soda and began to relax. Next up was the blind violinist, whose performance had been known to invoke rain from the sky and move dictators to tears. Pushing against the crowd, Daniel led Meridia to the front. Without giving her time to settle, he said the three words that at once sounded so simple and horrifying.

  “Dance with me.”

  Meridia stared at his open palm and attempted a laugh. “I already maimed your foot two days ago. Don’t you remember?”

  “Give me some credit. My bones are far from delicate.”

  “You can’t be serious. I hardly know—”

  Before she could utter another word, he guided her hands to his shoulders. A second rush of panic rooted her to the spot. She became aware of the crowd around them, laughing and staring, whether at them or at each other she could not tell. A drum pounded in her ears, and the sun flashed directly into her eyes. When Daniel began to move, she thought she would collapse like a pile of stone. They had not taken more than three steps when she stomped on his toes. Meridia’s clumsiness made her wince, but Daniel feigned such an anguished look that she roared into laughter. He smiled a second later, broadly, and her embarrassment dissipated with the breeze. As the violin soared into a finale, she forgot the crowd and rested her cheek against his. In those seconds, Meridia wondered how she could have lived for sixteen years and seven months without the touch of Daniel’s hand.

  For the next three months they met whenever they could. Meridia played truant from school. Daniel made excuses to his father and abandoned his work at the jewelry shop. Together they scoured the flower market, tossed coins at dancing snakes, viewed the evening projections at Cinema Garden, and tested the limits of their appetites with snacks made from goat testicles. In the bohemians’ quarters, Daniel showed her a former actress who gulped down baby mice to preserve her youth, and a hirsute man who annually gave birth to a burning bush. In a secluded corner where the poets starved, they saw a merchant hawk blood, breath, and bones for the ailing. When spring came, they sat for hours in little garden cafés, sharing, to the exasperation of the waiters, a cup of rice pudding. Sunset often found them in Independence Plaza, for at that deserted hour the town founder raised his marble fist and the rough cobblestones thundered with the march of an invisible army. If Meridia was aware that she was retracing some of her adventures with Hannah, she kept the thought to herself. She felt she owed it to Daniel to capture every sight afresh, unmarked and untainted by a previous memory.

  Daniel taught her how to interpret the stars. One night they scaled a secluded promontory and spied upon the lady in the moon. Another afternoon, they dipped their feet in a spring of immortality while archaic turtles nibbled at their toes. He took her to golden fields of lilies, and, on a broad plain of grass, they listened to bald nuns ululate wi
th the wolves. From these jaunts, Meridia learned that they lived in the only part of the world where snow fell but never chilled, where the sun blazed with tropical intensity but never scorched. Viewed from the same secluded promontory, the town with its neat streets and ordered houses appeared bathed in an otherworldly light. The brightness of this light was matched only by Daniel’s eyes, shining with life and vitality as he initiated her into the mysteries of the earth.

  One day, he was explaining to her the paths of summering birds when she asked him, “How do you know all this?”

  “My father,” he answered. “He thinks the secrets of the universe are far easier to understand than a woman’s heart.”

  Daniel said this with such a straight face that Meridia laughed. Little did she know that many times in the years to come the words would return to haunt her.

  In a short time, Meridia fell into devastating love. Without hesitation she forged Ravenna’s signature and excused her absences from the school with imaginary illnesses. At the bookshop next to the courthouse, she studied the fashionable magazines that Hannah had found so indispensable, and for the first time in her life took their advice to heart. She used up her allowance on shoes and dresses, on velvet hats and gloves and lotions, all of which lost their appeal the second she unwrapped them at home. She fought tooth and nail against the apparitions for a space in the mirror, and stoically ignored their catcalls when they allowed her reflection to appear. One morning, it was Gabriel who caught her while she examined herself in the hall mirror before school. He frowned at her lace dress and glossy pink lips, but before he could say a word, she bowed and swept to the door with the arrogance of love shimmering in her breast.

  Every night she feasted on her memory of Daniel. Neglecting her studies, she summoned him through sighs and whispers, rendering in her mind his deep eyes and chiseled jaw and full lips parted on the verge of a kiss. At the stroke of midnight, the smell of his skin magically filled the room, a heady scent of sun and sea that braced her unlike anything she had ever known. Meridia smiled with pleasure at the remembered touch of his hand. Reliving a single, fugitive glance down the side of his throat drove her mad with longing. In the infernal hours, the bed creaked under her delirium, and sleep, if it came, offered no refuge from the tempest in her blood.

  After they had spent twenty-seven afternoons together, Daniel took her to a beach of pure white sand. Sprawled on a blanket under a palm tree, they were taking turns reading from a book when a dozen seagulls ripped the sky open with their wings. The birds were falling, plummeting fast out of the clouds as if they had been shot. Daniel dropped the book and jumped up. The seagulls landed on the sand not far from them, hopping and squawking like mad with their beaks pointed toward the sea. A minute later a wooden chest rode the surface of the waves and bobbed to shore. The birds crowded around it; at Daniel’s approach they flapped their wings and took to the sky. Meridia got up from the blanket and followed him.

  “What is it?” she asked anxiously.

  “A coffin. A child’s, from the size of it. How in the world did it ever get to sea?”

  Meridia felt something crawl in her belly. Tilting the chest to one side, Daniel pried it open and drew back after a brief struggle. Meridia looked over his shoulder and immediately wished she had not.

  Curled in the chest’s center was the carcass of a newborn fawn. Frothy and bluish of skin, its stomach was pecked to pieces, the innards splattered over the ribs like cords of ribbon. There was a deep welt around the fawn’s neck, and tiny brown worms were spilling out of its eyes. Meridia had just enough time to cover her nose when a rodent pushed its way out of the gaping mouth. Her scream was followed by Daniel slamming the lid back in place.

  “I hope it didn’t suffer much,” he said. “At least someone was kind enough to give it shelter.”

  “How could it not suffer with those wounds?” she challenged him at once. “Whoever stuffed that poor thing in that box is probably the same person who killed it.”

  Meridia surprised even herself with her sharpness. Turning abruptly, Daniel regarded her with concern. His stare was exceedingly tender, yet for some reason she found it more unbearable than Gabriel’s disdain.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, lifting a thumb to her cheek. “You look as pale as a ghost.”

  Before she could answer, the sand slipped from beneath her feet. She fell flat on her back, screaming because a thousand birds were suddenly pecking at her womb.

  “What is it?” cried Daniel, dropping to his knees and pulling her to his lap.

  Blinded by tears, Meridia rolled away in agony. As she struggled to rise, a wracking heave seized her and she began to retch. The next thing she knew, she was sitting back on her heels and blinking in bewilderment. Aside from the remnants of her lunch, the sand stretched pure and white. The sea was a dancing, swaying mass of gold. It took her a moment to realize that the birds were no longer pecking at her womb.

  “What is it?” repeated Daniel as he helped her stand. “Tell me where it hurts.”

  “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said, absently throwing sand over the vomit. “I suppose the stench was too much for me to handle.”

  “Ah, women and their nerves,” he said in obvious relief, pressing her shoulders gently. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Meridia nodded with a smile, more out of politeness than conviction. Seeing Daniel’s bright gaze, she decided not to tell him that even then fear was clawing its way into her heart. She was certain that the fawn was an omen for a calamity to come. They had angered the spirits. The seer had cursed them for making a fool out of him. In her agitation, she became convinced that the future held only doom and misfortune.

  “What are you thinking of?” asked Daniel. “Right this second, what is going through your mind? Tell me.”

  Meridia snapped out of her musing, sweeping clean the merest hint of it.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m not thinking of anything.”

  Daniel lowered his voice playfully. “You’re full of clever little secrets, aren’t you? Don’t you ever let anyone know what’s brewing in your head?”

  He leaned close. In that second, just when she felt the heat of his glance subduing her knees, she became aware of the acidity in her breath. The thought that she had retched before him, groveled like an animal in pain or labor without the slightest dignity, mortified her beyond reason. Quickly she raised a hand to her mouth, not realizing until too late that it was smeared with sand. Petrified, she waited not for her composure to return but for his laughter to erupt.

  But when he opened his mouth, it was only to say that she had sand on her lips. He took her hand and leaned even closer. She held her breath so he could not smell it, but he waited so patiently that in the end she had to gasp for air. Without a warning he plucked the anxiety from her lips. She began to tremble, still not wholly aware of what was happening. All that felt real was the taste of sand and sweat, passing from his mouth to hers like the breath of life.

  Neither of them could later recall how they tumbled to the sand or how long they kissed before their mouths ran dry. When they finally got up, their clothes were rumpled and the sun was down to its last shimmer. On the sand where they had grappled lay half-formed circles and triangles, each one left by the impassioned movements of their limbs. The evening wind rose and made Meridia shiver. Her pale yellow skirt was dripping seawater.

  “This is the real omen,” she said to herself. “Not the fawn, but this.”

  Daniel came up from behind and circled his arms around her. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”

  She tilted her neck and brushed her cheek against his smooth chin. “I said we should bury the fawn,” she said.

  They turned at the same time to the spot where they had left the chest. There was nothing there. Hurrying back, they could not locate a single mark or indentation in the sand. Dumbfounded, they searched up and down the beach until a sharp glimmer in the water caught Meridia’s eye. The ches
t was floating in the middle of the sea, drifting toward the sun with all the calm and contentment of dusk. They watched it without speaking, and after a time, the chest vanished in the rippling surface of the sea.

  SEVEN

  Three months from the day they met, Meridia walked the breadth of town, shining, and the dogs followed. Ten in all, they caught her shine from alleys and doorways and noiselessly marched single file behind her. Encased in a sleeveless blue dress with embroidered peonies and a high collar, Meridia noticed neither the dogs nor her shine, nor the mournful chime of the town bell that quarterly measured her progress. She walked with her chin high and her back straight, making no stop until she arrived at 27 Orchard Road. Even then, she paid no attention when a large mastiff from next door flew past her and attacked the shadowing dogs. Daniel was already approaching from the terrace.

  “Don’t be nervous,” he cautioned, oblivious of the brawling dogs himself. “Heaven help them if they think you’re not perfect.”

  “Heaven help me if they think I am,” she answered with a smile.

  The house was an unassuming two-story of wood and exposed brick. It sat—or rather squatted—on flat ground, and the first impression it gave was of immitigable disorder. Dry grass sprouted from the eaves, a bird’s nest roosted on the roof, and moss and lichen ruptured over the bricks like angry boils. A wilderness of red roses smothered the front lawn, filling it to the edges with barely space for a clump of marigolds to survive. And yet, though it had nothing to recommend it in the way of grace or beauty, the house pulsated with undeniable warmth. The windows were wide and inviting, caged birds sang merrily from the terrace, and below them two rocking chairs nodded to each other as if engaged in an animated argument. A closer inspection suggested that loving hands had nurtured the wilderness of the roses without leaving anything to chance.